Re: employment with ada

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

Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:uof2enb7p.fsf@nasa.gov...
>
> While this is all true, consider what happened with Java. Sun marketed
> it agressively (for many reasons), and thus created the demand for it.
> There was no demand for it initially. They could have picked an
> existing language, and targeted it to a virtual machine.
>
Oh, sure. Absolutely. Without a doubt. I've argued here in the past that if
Ada had a big, institutional sponsor that was willing to sink some money
into developing the language infrastructure and into a big marketing effort,
it would be doing a lot better. Back in the day when the DoD was that big
sponsor, there was a problem: The DoD isn't a business and a) doesn't know
how to market a product and b) doesn't see that as their job. The world was
different back in that time and mistakes were made - what are you going to
do?

Remember that Ada was originally targeted for embedded systems back in a
time when computers were substantially smaller & weaker. It was not uncommon
for DoD projects to go off and develop a custom language & compiler just for
the project. Projects built lots of their own support tools. Ada was
substantially bigger than most of these languages and exceeded the
capabilities of much of the development hardware that was out there.
Technologically, it was too far ahead of its time, but as hardware got more
powerful and people began to expect more, from a marketing perspective, it
was behind the times. It was too big a language for any one project to go
out and custom-build a compiler for and projects were already turning away
from that anyway in favor of buying off-the-shelf tools. So you didn't have
the customary means of "bootstrapping" the language into use.

If we were to undertake it today, I think there would be a number of things
that the DoD (or any institutional sponsor) would want to do: Fund the
development of a compiler and support environment on some popular platform.
Make sure the compiler could be readily retargeted to other architectures.
Make the compiler readily available for either cheap or free. Set aside a
budget to buy lots of adds in trade journals & elsewhere for at least 1..2
years - basically get marketing experts and fund the marketing. They came
*dangerously* close to doing this with Gnat, but pulled back too soon for it
to take effect.

They funded the initial development of Gnat, but pulled back before it was a
real "product". ACT took it over while it was still a Science Fair Project
and, to their credit, turned it into a viable product. But ACT didn't
exactly come at this with deep pockets, so there wasn't money in the budget
to develop an IDE, a GUI, libraries, etc. They could only move at a slow
pace developing what the rest of the world takes for granted with any
"serious" language compiler. Again, to their credit, they are getting there,
but not in a timely fashion. (Every day that Gnat/Ada doesn't have what you
get with Java, is another day that some project decides to go with Java,
right?) They also didn't come at this with a big marketing budget so
whatever their marketing department is doing is basically trying to make
bricks without straw. They can't buy magazine ads, radio spots, get
interviews on network TV or NPR, etc. (Sun succeeded in doing a lot of that
with Java.) Had the government set aside a pile of money to fund ACT for a
couple of years to do all of the above, Ada95 would have been a
substantially bigger success and they would have protected their past
investment in Ada by making it viable for the big DoD contracts that were or
could be using it.

But then again, this isn't the proper roll for "government". It belongs to
someone like IBM or Microsoft. And, of course, they have no vested interest
in Ada and would have wanted something "different" anyway so that they
didn't inherit all the bad reputation Ada acquired and they would be
percieved as doing something "new" and "innovative".

At this point, I don't see how Ada could acquire a big institutional backer.
It may be possible, but I don't know who that would be or what they would
see as a benefit to themselves in doing so. Unless Ada were to possibly
"piggyback" on some other technology, such as a new PC operating system or
database or some similar product.


> As usual, the situation is complicated ...
>
It always is. Sigh...

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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