From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7961088baf0e34d6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff) Subject: Re: AIA Position on Ada Date: 1996/08/25 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 176407696 references: <96082413025149@psavax.pwfl.com> organization: /u/rogoff/.organization reply-to: rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-08-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: "Marin David Condic, 407.796.8997, M/S 731-93" writes: BTW: The argument "there's more C stuff out there..." is the only semi-plausable business/engineering reason to think that "C is better than Ada...", in my not-so-humble opinion. In every other respect Ada is as good as or better than C and I have never heard any convincing engineering reason to select C over Ada. Well, that little chestnut ("There's more C stuff out there...") can be expanded quite a bit (1) There is a larger existing base of C code than Ada code (2) There are more tools for C than for Ada (3) There are more programmers familiar with C than with Ada etc. No need to reply that a lot of this C code is unusable, that the tools exist to correct deficiencies absent in Ada 95, etc. I agree. IMO, the way to fight this battle is to write lots of Ada code that is better than the C, to build Ada tools that do more for Ada than Purify and co. do for C (how about Larch/Ada-95 and a free GC for Ada 95?), and to get more people looking at Ada as a C alternative. But then, this seems to be the way of things in a technological society. Beta was better than VHS - so VHS wins. VMS was better than UNIX, so UNIX wins. Macintosh was better than IBM-PC, so IBM-PC wins... etc. etc. etc. I believe that what is going on is an example of positive feedback in a control system. Once a technology is a bit more popular than a competing technology, its popularity becomes the reason that people choose it over its competitors. Hence time to market is usually more important than quality, and the type of market "conquered" (say PC vs workstation) is also important. Also, arguments like "VMS was better than UNIX" are plain wrong. The Symbolics Lisp machine environment circa 1985 was arguably better than any OS of the time, yet it didn't run on any other hardware. UNIX is portable, VMS isn't. Too fucking bad for VMS and Symbolics. Similar arguments can be made for the Mac (expensive, closed, yet functional and elegant). I first read the "positive feedback" argument in an old (late 1980s, early 1990s) Scientific American article titled "Positive Feedback in Economic Systems" or something like that. I don't believe that this argument applies perfectly to programming language acceptance however. Note that COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, and PL/I :-) still have active user communities. -- Brian