Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

I don't mean to suggest that a committee should design the library, but I
can't see how you're going to avoid a committee deciding what is going to be
considered part of Ada. If there was only a single vendor of Ada and no
users of Ada, then the vendor gets to design what goes in Ada. The instant
it becomes plural and/or has users with various interests, there's your
committee.

If I were Dictator of the Universe, the way it would happen would be to have
the vendors and the major users cough up a few intelligent individuals to
serve as the committee to decide what the design parameters are and survey
what's already out there to see if anything can be adopted or modified.
Select one person to be the designer and then review/approve his work. Give
them a deadline to come up with an initial result and give them sufficient
resources to get that done. I'd imagine something like that could get you at
least a container library in two or three months. Maybe more than that.
Establish some reasonable objectives with a broad brush and let some smart
people agree on what the details should be. (Mission Statement: "Go figure
out how to give Ada some development leverage for some significant subset of
development projects via libraries. Subjects to consider are Containers,
Math, Text Processing, OS Interfacing, Communications, GUI, {etc}. First
Deadline: A working Containers package, under a tree extensible to other
areas, within 3 months.")

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:8db3d6c8.0212170741.18770baa@posting.google.com...
>
> That is the problem with Ada, it is the 'committee' thing.
>
> committees can not write or design software. May be review or comment
> on it only.
>
> the best libraries and software out there was written by a single,
> or two talented individuals. Only in the Ada world I keep seeing this
> committee thing pop up all the time. The more people work on software,
> the worst and more delayed it gets.
>
> my 2 cents.