Re: Alsys, how insignificant is 18,000?

[world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian)]

>According to your logic, MRI scans, organ transplants, and other
>modern advanced medical technologies would be "dead" because they are
>clearly more expensive, and far less "popular," than first aid kits
>and Band Aids.

   No, that's not my logic.  Take MRI scans - they can provide information
unattainable with first aid kits and Band Aids (unless your first aid kit
contains one of Star Trek's tricorders).  The cost of an equivalent number
of band aids and tongue depressors and needles and string to open up
your brain and get the same information that an MRI scan can give is orders
more expensive than an MRI scan cost (and much more deadly).

    Thus an MRI scan is more cost effective for the goal - trying to get
specific detailed information about the interior of the body.  

    Your analogy also suffers because there is a far wider differential
in capabilities between band aids and MRI, than there is between Ada and
C++ (or anything else) compilers.  People are choosing C++ technology
over Ada, with their own money (and fault in your analogy), because for
90% of their missions, C++ is more cost effective than Ada (given the
supply of programmers, tools, libraries, books that are available).

    About the only arena in which this discussion is more difficult,
large scale programming projects, for both the military and the civilian
sector, Ada may be more cost effective than C++.  However since there is
no independently validated economic models and data sets to address this
question, and since there are growing defections inside the DoD itself
to use C/C++ for very large projects, the existence of the Mandate is
questionable, and a potential threat to national security.

    So my original point still sticks, that outside the Mandated world,
where people are free to spend their own money, Ada is dead.  And until
someone can come up with some better demographic data than the stuff I
have been posting, (something maybe MITRE can pester ESD to fund them 
to find), and some better explanation of why all of the Ada compiler
companies are refocusing on C++, no one will believe any DoD claims about
Ada's "success".

Greg
-- 
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Greg Aharonian
 Source Translation & Optimiztion
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178