Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Well, yes, of course. You still have to make your case. I've made the case
with metrics within the realm of digital electronic controls - but that's an
environment with very specialized needs. I believe the case *could* be made
in other areas, but Ada has to be bigger than just a compiler that conforms
to the ARM. If, for example, there were an environment that rivaled MSVC++
in terms of functionality and did it more reliably and with less obfuscation
and you had some data to indicate that similar apps can be built faster with
"Visual Ada" than with MSVC++, would that not start making a case for why
people should switch?

My real point is that the "Ada Mentality" has traditionally concentrated on
high reliability and lower long-term costs for long-lived systems and that
this is not necessarily what the vast bulk of developers are buying. Not
that its a bad thing to have high reliability, etc. More a matter of the
driving factors in many development efforts tend to be around "How quick can
you get me something that works out the door???" Without analyzing the
rightness/wrongness of that driver, accept fot the moment that it is a fact.
(id est, that most developments are driven by time to market.) If that's the
case and you walk in with your Ada compiler and someone else walks in with
their XYZ language that has a spiffy IDE, massive library of utilities, GUI,
etc. You tell the customer "My language will build highly reliable
long-lived software better than XYZ." and the other guy says "But with all
my tools and libraries, I'll get you a product 3 to 6 months sooner than his
will because you'll have to spend all that time duplicating the same stuff
in Ada that already comes with my kit." Who wins the sale?

So if Ada as a community or culture or whatever it is, were to shift its
emphasis and start concentrating on Time To Market, I'd bet we would come up
with some really successful stuff. If the language standardization Powers
That Be put that at the top of their list of priorities in considering
revisions, that would help. If the vendors looked to optimize, demonstrate
and sell Time To Market, that would help. If the hackers started using their
imaginations on what/how to build software faster through interesting
hacker-tools, that would help. If the academics did more studies on
productivity in software development and research into tools/techniques that
made Ada faster in this regard, that would help.

There are no guarantees here, but I think that in many cases Ada gets
dismissed because of Time To Market issues and so addressing that becomes
the cost of admission if it wants to be a player.

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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Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:WcIJ9.2225$c6.2445@bos-service2.ext.raytheon.com...
>
> If you could _convince_ them it would get them to market faster.
> My point was that they first find out that it doesn't get
> something COMPILED faster, so they drop it and never find out
> how long it takes to get to market.
>
> And in the "hacker" world (in the good sense of the term),
> getting something compiled is for some a good goal in itself,
> because that way you get it out there faster for other people
> to debug.
>
> Hmmm.  Come to think of it, getting it out there for
> the customer to debug seems to be the paradigm in
> some commercial domains as well!
>