From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 7 Apr 93 01:35:07 GMT From: world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe? Message-ID: List-Id: >Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted in >European countries more quickly than in the U.S. What is(are) ROOT cause(s)? As someone has already mentioned, Europe has a long history of useful languages similar to Ada (Algol, Simula, Chill, Pascal) that there was enough recognition by management in Europe of these languages to make the acceptance and choice of Ada easier. This is purely a marketing viewpoint: prior exposure in the commercial media made it accept for Ada evangelists to make the case for Ada. In the US, with not much of a history with these languages, the near virtual absence of such languages in the general trade press created no prior exposure for such concepts, so that making the case for Ada has been difficult, if not impossible. The other reason is that in some sense, what goes on in Europe is somewhat irrelevant to the future software industry (an extreme point for the following reasons). The entire software and computer industry is undergoing a massive paradigm shift from centralized mainframes to distributed processing. This shift has been made possible by the desktop computer revolution. Big mainframes are becoming history, except for having a role as massive file servers. Just look at IBM, Fujitsu, and other companies who have lost income and stock value as thsi point hits home. The new players are companies like Microsoft, Novell, Lotus, Borland, Intel, Apple, and other companies who have grown since the early 1980's into the powerhouses that they now are, dominating the future of computing for the foreseeable future. And all of these companies have been and are using C/C++, were weaned on C/C++, and will continue to use C/C++. Many of their employees were in school during the 1980's when C/C++ spread like wildfire, and are now carrying on in that tradition. Thus when management are companies look around to make their decisions, most of the language exposure seen in the trade press is for C/C++/Smalltalk, and most of the salespeople they see are from the companies cited above that are based on C/C++. Thus it is at great risk from them to choose Ada, as evidenced by its dismal market share outside of the Mandated world. Short of nationalizing Microsoft, the DoD is going to have no chance of seeing Ada83 or Ada9X win greater market share, and especially not Ada9X if any of Dr. Ichbiah's concerns prove correct. Your question, like many other such questions, are complex questions of socioeconomics that the DoD has refused to address with regards to Ada. Until it does, Ada will continue to be a niche language outside the Mandated world where people spend their own money, undermining implicit assumptions behind the Mandate. For example, I have been privately circulating a proposal to do a study on the actual demographics of programming language use outside the Mandated world over the last ten years - a more exhaustive analysis of the type of demographics I occasionally post to comp.lang.ada. The response I have gotten to date is "What's the point?". It's that attitude that condemns Ada to its fate as a great niche language. Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimization -- ************************************************************************** Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimiztion P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178