Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

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

"martin.m.dowie" <martin.m.dowie@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:fFXu8.31411$tZ1.7228185@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com...
>
> Nice idea, but who?
>
Good question. Defer for a moment, but think along the lines of "Big Into
Computers..."


> Boeing are an obvious candidate given their history of Ada use - but is
that
> still true? And even it it was, it just reinforces the preconception that
> Ada is
> only any use in the avionics field (which I think we can all appriciate is
> not
> true).
>
From rumors I've heard Boeing is drifting away from Ada for a lot of the
same reasons as other aerospace firms - the programmers want to work in
something more marketable.

Besides, Boeing is an airframer and not a computer company, so they have
limited influence on what other computer companies would do. Unless maybe
you just want to sell them on the idea of building a development environment
for various systems and have them pay the freight of doing the development
cost. But then they've got an ownership interest which they'd have to be
stupid to ignore - and you're in bed with the elephant.

> Reuters news agency I understand use it but not throughout.
>
Probably not big enough and certainly not in the "technology" business to
want to finance some computer project.


> CANAL+ could be a better bet - are you out there Pascal?
>
Maybe - but are they big enough and interested enough to finance some sort
of Ada endeavor?


> Anyone else any better ideas?..
>
Some of this depends on what you think you want to do as far as "A Thing
Financed By A Deep Pockets Contributor That Has A Side Effect Of Promoting
Ada..."

Say the objective is to build the world's spiffiest IDE for/with Ada. Ada's
advantages are reliability and portability. Suppose you had someone like
Compaq who thought it might be attractive to the market to provide
OS-agnosticism: "Yeah, we'll give you a computer with Windows or Linux or
Both!" (It would distinguish them from Sun, and other PC makers maybe?) But
now they've got to encourage development that compliments their strategy.
Suppose they could offer developers a kit that would let them use gcc-based
compilers to target both OS's? We say: Sure! No sweat! We can build an IDE &
some libraries and what have you that lets an app builder develop for one
direction and recompile to go the other way. We can fix it so that any of
the gcc based compilers could be your choice for development
(language-agnostic) but we implemented in Ada, so it will just be more
natural and easy to use Ada...

Or suppose that IBM figures that its time to produce the next generation of
personal computer and try to regain the market share it once had? We say:
Sure! We can help! We'll go build you a new state-of-the-art OS programmed
in Ada that will distinguish your product with higher reliability and
security...

Or much nearer and dearer to my heart: What about the Digital TV set-top box
business? If we were proposing to build an OS/Development package that
targeted this sort of device and offered higher reliability with faster time
to market, etc. as a consequence of including Ada software, you've got
access to a whole burgeoning market that is likely to attract lots of new
developers.

Where I'm going with this is somewhere along the lines of dreaming up a
whole product that has Ada as a significant component and selling the idea
to some big guy in that market. Get them thinking along the lines of
incorporating Ada as a key piece of their product. You'd have to think of
something that leaves them to some extent "language neutral" since they
won't want to jump into Ada with both feet and not have alternatives. The
strategy there is to dream something up that says "You can use any language
you want - it will just be easier with Ada because that's where it all comes
from..." (That's one of the reasons C got to be big, right?)

Think about it......

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