Re: Way OT: Adam Smith and Software Markets

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

Well, a lot more goes into making a language popular than just large
libraries of stuff. Given that Eiffel doesn't have a huge institutional
sponsor to push it and doesn't have a huge installed base of related
products or users (for example, the relationship between Unix and C), it has
done pretty well for itself. I think my position is that there are certain
necessary conditions that have to be there or it becomes
difficult-to-impossible for a language to thrive. If Ada wants to compete
with the likes of C/C++/Java and is looking to carve out a big slice of the
pie, it has to look at what it is that makes a language attractive to the
consumers of languages. Large libraries of utility code is one factor that I
think needs to be there to offer the developer leverage. A GUI interface in
some form is another factor. Undoubtedly, there are others. These things
don't have to be part of the standard, but they need to be available with
most compilers in such a way that people think of them as being part of the
language.

There is no simple answer here. All I can offer is that after twenty years
of Ada basically providing a compiler and saying it is superior for
reliability and long lived, large projects, people are staying away from it
in droves. We don't want to abandon the reliability and maintainability, but
looking at what the market wants and trying to provide that might help turn
that tide. Ignoring the market and saying "They're all a bunch of idiots who
don't know what's good for them..." isn't going to help. :-)

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

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Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message
news:b45mqa$h1m$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
>
> Yes, I think that describes it very well, yet with ISE's Eiffel
> you get a standard library of utility code, a slick IDE, both a portable
> and a system specific GUI, database interfacing, parsing, XML,
> language defined tasking, commercial support from various compiler
> producers, excellent literature, but still, is it in wide use?
>