Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

steve_H <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8db3d6c8.0212091445.12594821@posting.google.com...
>
> This is like the chicken and egg problem. Ada won't get popular until
> more packages are available. And no packages will be written to it if it
> is not popular.
>
But its a chicken and egg problem that has been solved before with other
languages. Granted, it takes resources of one kind or another, but building
the infrastructure *has* been done in the past so it *could* be done in the
future.


> The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada
support,
> where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
> installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
> and all the packages are there.
>
If you can only think of one way to solve a problem, you have not thought
about it long enough. :-)

I will grant you that if Ada were completely integrated into gcc so that
when you got it, it just plain worked right out of the box, that this would
help encourage use of Ada. I've stated here in the past similar things about
development kits. Sure, there are nice tools out there for Ada, but you've
got to go out on the net and get X and Y and Z all from different sources
and cobble them together into a patchwork of development tools and then,
maybe, you've got equivalent capabilities to what people might get right out
of the box from MSVC++ or Sun-Java. But that makes it *hard* and not very
pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
pointing them down the path of least resistance.

So, yes, integrating Ada fully into gcc would help. But that's not the total
answer.


> There is no other way left for Ada for it to become popular. All the
> tricks and the speeches have been tried and said.
>
Sure there is. Like I said, lots of different factors can contribute to
making Ada more popular - gcc integration being one of them. What is wrong
with the notion of looking at the Ada standard and the direction the
language takes as a possible mechanism for improving its popularity? I don't
think that the syntax or semantics of the language itself needs much
improvement, but what it *does* need is some sort of effort to create large
libraries of utilities that provide development leverage. (Libraries as a
"Convention" rather than a "Standard".) If something similar could be done
to give Ada a GUI interface that could be the "Convention" across a number
of platforms, that would help add development leverage. Anything that gives
a developer an edge in getting out the door faster is a help.

People I know who don't have some sort of knee-jerk, anti-Ada response will
often admit that the language has many superior qualities, but that they
can't/won't use it to develop their products because other languages give
them some significan leverage they just can't get with the average Ada
compiler. It may be a tough nut to crack, but if it isn't cracked, Ada will
forever be an interesting "also ran" language.


> Commerical Ada compilers from closed commerical companies would make
> no difference to the popularity of a language.  (unless one can
> buy it for $99.99 and have full IDE with it, etc.. Sorta like
> the TurboPascal days, which made Pascal the most popular language
> in its days).
>
Yes, commercial compilers can and will make a difference. Microsoft doesn't
give away MSVC++ and they don't open source it and yet it is a very popular
development environment. Why? IMHO, its because it provides tons of leverage
for getting a GUI based app out the door on a Windows platform. Granted,
commercial products must be within the reach of "The Masses" or Ada can
never become "The Language Of The Masses". ACT charges lots of money for
Gnat to its commercial customers, but makes the unsupported, older versions
available free of charge for The Masses. There are other Ada compilers out
there that are available at reasonable cost too. The thing is that they are
all too often trailing other compilers/IDEs in terms of features and end up
in the "also ran" category rather than getting out front and leading the way
with something truly "different".


> It is not the few Ada programmers working inside Boeing or the defenss
> department who will write those package for everyone to use, it is the
> open source programmers, the college students who want to make some
> impact, and the inspiring programmers who love to program and want
> to spend the whole weekend coding for the love of it. Now those
> programmers turn to C and C++ and Java becuse it is everyone and free. Ada
> full support in gcc makes Ada an option, and only then you will start to
> see more Ada packages and more systems built with Ada.
>
Speaking as someone inside the defense industry, I'll say this. The Defense
industry may not be the driving force behind Ada or what will make it
popular - we have too many specialized needs that don't line up well with
those from the "real world" - but the Defense industry is at least keeping
Ada on life support & providing it with the time it needs to gain in
popularity within the commercial and educational sectors.

Yes, the college kids who hack things together in the free software world
are going to make a contribution to the popularity of the language. Its just
that somewhere along the line, Ada has to find a way to pay the freight. It
has to have some amount of commercial success behind it or nobody is there
to pay the bills. When a student graduates from college will he go to work
for some company developing software and do it free of charge just for the
fun of it? Well compiler vendors are companies too and they've got to pay
those graduates something, don't they? So they'd better have some market for
their wares besides college-kid-hackers or they won't have much of a
business to support further development of tools for the language.


> Ada has to grow from the bottom up (if it is to have a chane), from the
> masses up. Not from the officies of corporate America down to the
> programmers. That is why I think rational rose Ada compiler, or any other
> expensive commerical Ada compiler being there or not, will make no
> difference to the popularity of Ada. After all, we hade those for years,
> and it did not make Ada any more popular.
>
We may be in partial agreement here - possibly for different reasons. Yes,
Rational's price for an Ada compiler has never been "Rational" - at least
from where I've sat in the purchasing seat. (Corporate as well as personal).
Lots of vendors were way over the line with prices back then. This *did*
hurt Ada in the early days. I looked at vendors way back when (who shall
remain nameless) and was awestruck at the testicular fortitude it took to
price a compiler in the $100,000 neighborhood and then further tell you that
it could only be run on some specialized machine that only they made and
that the compiler would only target that machine - thus making it a) totally
useless to me and b) way too expensive in comparison to what I could get
elsewhere. (When you could buy a development computer with Unix on it and it
came with a C compiler - and you could get a cross compiler for your target
as well - for a fraction of what they were asking, it got real easy to see
why the decision got made to go with C.)

Ground-up popularity is certainly important. Kids coming out of college who
know Ada and are impressed by it and want to use it will help make it
popular. Part-time hackers putting together free software will help it too.
But don't underestimate the value of being able to go to corporate America
and tell them "I can get you to market in 50% of the time with 4x fewer
defects..." If that sale gets made, that will be what pays the bills to
enable the students and hackers to go off and have some fun.

MDC
--
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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