Re: Why it was a bad idea to drop The Mandate.

[gwinn@res.ray.com (Joe Gwinn)]

In article <66vlm7$61q@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com>, Richard D Riehle
<laoXhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> In article <gwinn-1112971205070001@dh5055146.res.ray.com>,
>         gwinn@res.ray.com (Joe Gwinn) wrote:
> 
> >What Emmett Paige also has said in the memos discussing the lifting of
> the
> >Mandate is that they dropped the Mandate because it simply was not
> >working.  Translation:  He was forced to, by market realities.  
>   ...  delete stuff
> >Joe Gwinn
> 
[snip]
> I recall as a child I too refused to eat my broccoli.  My mother, a
> wonderful cook in most respects, simply could not prepare palatable
> broccoli.  Only after I became an adult did I discover that broccoli is
> actually tasty as well as good for my health.  Perhaps, with broccoli as
> an option rather than as a parental demand, more of the recalcitrant
> children will, in the future, make the intelligent choice.  

Well, I always liked broccoli, but hated lima beans, and still dislike
them.  Never did grow up, I guess.  Even when the gray whiskers came.

Seriously, I don't thing that Ada's success depended on such trivial
things.  Lots of managers were forcing the programmers to use Ada, also
believing that the problems of Ada83 were just childish resistance on the
part of some programmers.  The problem was that even the true believers
had problems getting it all to work in the early days (I did get it to
work, but it was a struggle in many places).  

Now the problem is simply that Ada stood still for ten years, for whatever
reason, while the UNIX/C/C++ world grew exponentially.  Technical issues
are irrelevant here.  C/C++ folk may or may not be less adept than Ada
folk, but there are orders of magnitude more C/C++ folk than Ada folk, and
some of them are pretty smart.


Joe Gwinn