Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

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

Bill Findlay <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:BA3AC562.17A7%yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk...
>
> It was a joke, Marin.
>
Ahhh, but a "joke" that's been seriously suggested here before. :-)


> > Eventually, they open the box up and see the same old Ada and word gets
out.
>
> "Same old Ada"? For all practical purposes Ada 95 is the same age as Java.
>
By which I meant that simply changing the terminology to be more "Macho"
and/or just tinkering with the syntax a little to make it look different
isn't going to fool anyone into thinking its something "new".


> "Word gets out"? What word is that? Are you saying that there are serious
> unacknowledged technical defects in Ada 95?
>
Nope. See above.

> Opposition to Ada in comp.arch fell into three categories, which I parody
> (grotesquely unfairly, I admit 8-) as follows:
> (1) "We don't care about software quality. We make money selling ****
> written in C, and that's fine with us."
> (2) "We do care about software quality. We write our software in C (or
> other, even less safe, languages) and ensure its quality by being
faultless
> programmers and superior human beings. Ada is for talentless losers."
> (3) "Ada is too low-level. Our favourite language is
Functional-Telepathy/1,
> which generates an optimal program for you while you are still thinking
> about the specification. It should be implemented real soon now."
>
> Depressingly, type (1) critics were in a majority. When shown evidence
(the
> Rational data) that Ada could help them to make even more money, the
> response was "I don't believe it"; taken even to the point of suggesting
> that Rational had fabricated their figures. In other words: "I've no
> evidence of my own, so I'll find reasons to ignore yours".
>
> The intensity of denial was astonishing.
>
I understand and sympathize. The problem is that those are your potential
customers for Ada and if you don't find a way to persuade them with
*something* then you'd might as well just give up. I've had my own data
showing how Ada can make more money and the problem is that this sort of
data just doesn't seem to help people get interested in it. Mostly because
it is "Life Cycle" money and most business efforts are driven by "Time To
Market" money. They don't care if it costs more in the long run because if
it doesn't get there first, it won't earn anything anyway, so better to
spend more "in the long run" if whatever you do gets a product out the door
quicker.

So if we could find a way to show some segment of this market that Ada
brought them some truckload of leverage that got them to market twice as
fast, don't you think they'd perk up and be interested? I did a stint in the
Cable TV Set Top Box world and if Ada had been there with a whole package of
stuff that got the box delivered faster - and with fewer defects - it might
have been given a serious shot. (And found a nice "emerging technology" to
tie itself to.) There ought to be some segment of the developer world that
Ada can address more effectively by listening to its concerns and providing
it with leverage.


> Type (2) and type (3) critics tended to post from academic domains (no
> surprise 8-), although academia did not have a monopoly on false pride.
>
> It's interesting that essentially no-one objected to Ada on the grounds of
> technical or pragmatic issues such as are are openly discussed here.
>
So if you want to sell to them, using technical arguments of superiority or
pragmatic arguments of life cycle costs aren't going to work. (That
shouldn't be news. Ada's been making that case for 20 years now and
customers are ignoring it by the millions.) That means we ought to find out
what the customer *would* buy and find a way to get that into Ada if it
doesn't already exist.


> > I don't think Ada is *bad* -
>
> That's damming with faint praise. I think Ada 95 is very, very good
indeed.
>
Maybe. I've been an Ada advocate for a very long time, so I think I'm on
record as saying nice things about it. My intent was to indicate that I
didn't see some fundamental flaws in the language itself that were causing
it to fail to be adopted. Syntactic or semantic changes are probably not
necessary on any large scale - more an emphasis on what else Ada provides
besides its syntax & semantics.


>
> Why do you care whether anyone adopts Ada, if "reliability, etc" is not
the
> primary concern? I look at this the other way round. I want the general
> level of software quality to rise, and I believe that better understanding
> and wider adoption of Ada would promote this objective. I'm more than
happy
> to make common cause with anyone, such as yourself, who has ideas about
how
> to make that happen. But I do not think that it is Ada that is the
barrier;
> and I do think that the barrier is fairly impenetrable. 8-(
> --
O.K. I hope I can make myself crystal clear on this one: I am NOT opposed to
reliability nor do I think it is irrelevant or should be taken out of the
language or anything of that sort. What I'm saying is that Ada has been
harping on "Reliability" for TWENTY YEARS and people are staying away from
it in droves. Twenty more years of harping on reliability is not likely to
change that. Hence, let's keep reliability in our back pocket to pull out
when it makes sense to talk about it, but in the mean time, lets find
something more appealing to put in front of the potential users that they
might actually care about. Find out what some commercial developers in some
sector might want in a programming language and fill that need. When they
get reliability as a byproduct, then you can pull the "See??? I Told You
So!!!" out of your back pocket and we can all brag about that.

As someone who likes and uses Ada, I'd like to see the language grow and
prosper. I think the best way to do that is to get Ada focused on providing
something that some large segment of the developer population just can't
resist using. If we give thought to that, maybe we can come up with the
right changes and the right focus.

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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