Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Interesting, but not compelling. Consider that if all I want is a quick note
to my boss, that opening up a document and starting to type is all I really
want to do. If I've got to learn all sorts of commands that ultimately
produce an illuminated manuscript, that's nice, but not what I needed.

While I'm all in favor of Ada catching errors up front and I accept that
this means programmers need a mental shift from C to avoid frustration, I
think that this "Ada Mentality" is in some way blinding the community to
what the ultimate customer wants and needs. We keep thinking "Take your time
and get it right. It'll pay in the long run". This may be true and the
customer will be glad he's got that one day, but what would be far more
compelling in making the sale is "This will get you to market faster!" If
the Ada community started focusing in on developmental leverage that got
someone to market quicker, that would be a quality they wouldn't (and
couldn't!) ignore.

If you build & market accounting software and Ada could get your new product
done a couple of months ahead of your competitor's new product, you'll jump
on it - or your competitor will. Getting a *good* accounting package out of
the deal would be a bonus, but a *good* one that hits the shelves 6 months
after the competitors package does is worthless.

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

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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steve_H <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8db3d6c8.0212101850.51506572@posting.google.com...
>
> I think this is a way similar to the Latex vs Word debate. Let
> Latex be Ada here and MS Word be C.
>
> It is much easier to write a quick something in MS Word. Just open
> the document and start typing.
>
> It takes more time to first learn Latex, few commands to learn, and more
> advanced commands, and one has to compile it and then view it. However,
> if one invests the time to learn Latex, and get all the commands right,
> then their final output will be so much better than the 'quick'
> MS Word can ever generate, and it is a great investment that will
> pay multiples over a life time. And actually with time, one will find the
> producing documents with Latex is faster.
>
> But most will not spend the few short days to learn Latex initially, (will
> get either frustrated quickly, or would not even try it as it 'looks'
hard)
> and will insead spend their life producing ugly documents with MS Word.
>
>
>
>
>
> > The challenge is to educate people that fighting with
> > the compiler is much preferred over looking
> > for memory leaks and other odd corruption problems.  In other
> > words quality time spent with your Ada compiler is much
> > less than the quality time you spend with your debugger.