Re: Marketing Ada: Is the Sky Falling?

[smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)]

pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) writes:

> Is the dominance of C/C++ making all other languages marginal, leading
> them to an accelerating spiral of decline. Will these language survive? Will
> they survive in niche markets but not prosper (too few companies devoting too
> little effort to improving products)?  Is this the equivalent of "survival of
> the fitest" or "language genocide"?  We already know the PC implications [pun
> intended] of such a course of events.

Howdy,
        I think that they will survive (not all of them, but some
of them).  There are alot of hurdles, though. C/C++ has really
high _visibility_. It's on store shelves and advertised in popular
magazines.  It compiles well and makes programs that run well on
"low end" hardware. Implementations are often dirt cheap or free
(gcc).  You can drop down to assembly to do weird stuff easily in
many implementations.
        I think you have to aim right for the sweet spot of the
market: a brain dead CPU running a brain dead OS.  Other 
"alternative language" vendors seem to be doing ok: Digitalk's
Smalltalk/V, Borland's Turbo Pascal, MS's Visual Basic. I think
it helps to offer not just another language, but some other 
advantage as well. So Digitalk has various MIS related add ons
(PARTS, I think it's called). Borland is making a really cool
"Visual Pascal" that acts like VB in many ways but makes fast
compiled EXE's. Etc.
        I don't know how fun it would be to "succeed". Think 
of all the OS/2 designers/implementors at IBM sitting around
for god knows how long just _sweating the fat_ out of "Warp"
so it will run ok on a 4 meg machine. Blech. Probably lot's
more fun trying to get your favorite weirdo language 
compiler to generate code that will beat fortran on a 200
meg Silicon Graphics box, right?
        Anyway, most of the world doesn't _want_ a language
like C/C++. Too hard.  That's just what's "there" in the
market place.  So get yourself a few million dollars and
a sweat shop and a bunch of dumb windows boxes and go to
town ;-)

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Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
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