Re: is ada dead?

["Mark Lundquist" <up.yerz@nospam.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
message news:9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
misinformation
> and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.

I agree.

I've always been impressed with what Borland did with Delphi -- how they
avoided the "P-word" :-) and created the brand independent of the language.
Rather than focus attention on the language at a time when Pascal was no
longer fashionable, it draws attention to the value added by the Delphi
environment, tools and libraries.  So Delphi developers actually do think of
themselves as "developing in Delphi" not "in Object Pascal".

Would that work today for Ada?  Who knows... but I'm intrigued... :-)

> Part
> of the problem is visibility and part of the problem is the (IMHO, very
> sound) argument that by picking C++ or Java or some other language, a
> businessman can leverage all the stuff that comes with its toolkit (GUI
> builders, debuggers, library tools, class libraries, etc.) to get to
market
> quicker than can be done with Ada.
>
> Ada has historically concentrated on reducing lifecycle costs, which is a
> real advantage. However, a very large chunk of the market doesn't care
about
> the lifecycle. They care about time to market. Right or wrong, that's what
> people are buying

Lead-time considerations will tend to dominate over lifecycle considerations
under certain conditions, such as (off the top of my head):
        * In a new technology, where time to market translates into lead
time ("first-mover advantage");
        * In markets where the pace of change and/or innovation is high
enough that product life-expectancy is short (everything becomes obsolete in
a short time).
        * When you're not doing any reuse.

It also dominates if the market is full of thinkalike lemmings :-) who take
up the mantra of "time to market" uncritically.  It's too easy to believe
that "time to market is everything" when everybody else is saying that
too... in our business culture, nobody ever gets blamed for running with the
crowd, so if you never take the time to stop and ask, "Do we want to make
stuff that will be obsolete in a year?  Do we really have to?  What would
happen if we didn't?  What would it require to do it differently"?
One problem is that the success stories naturally get the attention, and it
turns out that most of them had first-mover advantage.  But what about the
flops?  How many of them had this advantage and flopped anyway?  We'll never
know because nobody is interested in the flops!  So first-mover advantage is
seen almost as sufficient for success, when maybe it is only necessary, and
in the long run maybe not even that.

But I think the opportunity for Ada is to position itself as the technology
that is most effective over the lifecycle, and that not at the cost of
lead-time!  For this, we need all the things you mentioned in your post...

-- Mark