Re: Ada Operating System

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Well, by that reasoning, Linux should have never been able to get going.
From bottom dead center, it had no useful apps or geek appeal or robustness.
It had to get started from *somewhere* to have anything to interest geeks in
developing things for it and it took time before it became something stable
and reliable, right?

Maybe I'm not so pessimistic about the possibilities. One thing is
absolutely certain - if one starts with an attitude of "It'll never work,
its doomed to fail, there's no hope..." then guaranteed it won't happen.

One of the reasons I suggest doing something that would (a) be a small
kernel starting point and (b) provide some realtime capability is because I
think that it alleviates the need for massive amounts of useful apps and
provides geek appeal. (The robustness we get just because, as all
right-thinking people know, its not possible to write bad code in Ada,
right? :-)

Imagine that you had a floppy that would let you boot up a garden variety PC
and be able to load a realtime app you constructed that could access
standard issue devices (serial port, ethernet card, etc.) There wouldn't be
geeks that would want to build toy apps and fool around with them? There
wouldn't be someone saying "Hey! I can still get some use out of this old
'386 hardware because I don't have to run Windoze needing a bajillion bytes
of memory, etc..."? Maybe even some commercial uses for PC compatible
embedded computers or PC based realtime apps? If it had some use in the
realtime/embedded world, it doesn't need an Office-like suite and it pretty
much has some instant geek-appeal as long as it provides some capabilities
you don't get with most other OS's.

I just think there is some potential for success - but it certainly needs
some minimal level of working stuff before it could generate much interest.
Will it happen? I don't know. It depends on getting a few die-hards together
aimed at a common goal and having the thing scoped out into something
achievable. Is the AdaOS project going to be it? I wish them all well and
hope they achieve what they set out to do, but I think its scope needs to be
drawn in a little & some progress made or it remains just a conversation
piece. Maybe it will get somewhere - I wouldn't write it off. Maybe some
spinoff effort derives from it. Its only impossible as long as people
believe it is.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"Wes Groleau" <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:3C88E0D1.89161C16@despammed.com...
>
> A pessimist's viewpoint:
>
> To make an operating system successful, you need
> at least one of
>
>  - sufficient quantity of useful applications
>
>  - sufficient geek appeal to attract developers.
>
>  - sufficent robustness/power/features to overcome
>    the lack of either of the others.
>
> To get people to write applications that run on it,
> it must have enough users to make people want to
> write apps for it.  So you have a chicken/egg problem
> for the first point.
>
> For the second, you have the prevailing distaste for
> Ada against you ("Us" if you will).
>
> On the robustness/power/features point, obviously
> Ada has a significant advantage over C/C++/Java.
>
> BUT, when you multiply the language potential
> by the number of developers, Linux still comes
> out ahead.  In spite of its implementation language,
> Linux is quite robust, and it has hundreds of
> developers for every AdaOS developer to keep it
> that way.  Shift the target to features, and
> Microsoft will always have you beat there.
> They will always sacrifice security/robustness
> to beat any competition in features.  And their
> "if you can't beat 'em, steal 'em" technique
> also applies.
>
> So on the third point, you have say a hundred
> developers and a language that scores ten on
> some arbitrary rating scale vs. several thousand
> developers and a language that scores one or two.
>
> Do the math and Ada loses.  Unfortunately.
>
> --
> Wes Groleau
> http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau