Re: Fed OOPS ... OOPS! We forgot to include Ada!

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>This low profile for Ada is continuing to hurt its credibility and
>marketability.  The absence of "big name" vendors who endorse Ada
>(even when their audience is non-government) is particularly
>discouraging.

    Then tell the DoD to stop wasting Ada monies on contractors who have no
long term plans to do anything with Ada.  IBM, which received tons of STARS
money, has pretty much completed its discarding of everything Ada by
announcing plans to develop a Visual-Basic clone to join its family of OO
languages of Smalltalk and C++.  IBM has a BIG booth at Object World in
Boston this week, and like it has for many years (including when it was
receiving big Ada bucks from the DoD), it has no mention of Ada.

    I have yet to see one STARS porker ever show up at a commercial trade
show and push the Ada STARS technology.  All of that STARS money would have
been much better invested in companies that really cared about commercializing
Ada and Ada-based software engineering, as opposed to just filling up some
troughs.

    As for non-troughers, why would anyone want to invest in Ada when an
investment in any other language offers potential returns hundreds of times
larger than investing in Ada?  They wouldn't, which is why no one is investing
large amounts OF THEIR OWN MONIES in Ada, nor are any venture capitalists.

Greg Aharonian

P.S.  I apologize for using words like "investments", "return", etc.  I know
how nauseating these words are to socialists.