Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

[Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-201006.rodent.frell.theremailer.net>]

> People with a prejudice against Ada will try to find any excuse to
> justify their rejection.  I think the main excuse they will try is "we
> cannot find Ada programmers".  To remove this excuse, it is of paramount
> importance that you show that (a) you know Ada and have experience with
> it, so you can be the "in-house expert" and (b) there is a wide offering
> of books, training courses, compilers, libraries and commercial support
> for the language.

If so, then the game is already over. There were days when the best tool
won, if after a little competition. Unfortunately now we are in the days of
software ruled by idiot bean counters and MBAs, and worse, the stock
market.

There is no such thing as vision that goes past the end of this quarter.

You can't sell a product, or a technology, or an employee who will save you
millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in the long run even if that
return on investments starts within a year or two. But you can sell a
cheaper anything this quarter.

The industry and academia killed Ada in commercial programming before it
ever got a chance. And now it's too late for anything that requires
changing a mindset or paying top dollar for a toolchain (look at GHS
prices!) or a high wage for Ada programmers, when Java and C++ jockeys are a
commodity labor item.

Unless you can come up with a programming platform/language/system that
costs you less right now, in people, in hardware, in software, you have the
snowball's chance in Hell of making it happen. Good doesn't matter, cheap
wins every time.