Re: OT: Word processing (was: Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada)

Re: OT: Word processing (was: Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada)

[Grein, Christoph]

> A side note:
> I made three files, one with a MS Notepad, one with MS Word, one with MS 
Excel. With each program I stored only the letter 'A'.
> Using the current settings that are used in my company (just ordinary "Windows 
settings", no special) I got the following result:
> 
> File length in bytes:
> text editor: 1
> MS Word: 19456
> MS Excel: 13824

That's not at all astonishing. A text editor does not add any formatting 
information.

Word and Excel add paper layout, font descriptions and what else... So what?

Re: OT: Word processing (was: Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada)

[Anders Wirzenius]

"Grein, Christoph" <christoph.grein@eurocopter.com> wrote in message news:mailman.1039598282.30657.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> > A side note:
> > I made three files, one with a MS Notepad, one with MS Word, one with MS
> Excel. With each program I stored only the letter 'A'.
> > Using the current settings that are used in my company (just ordinary "Windows
> settings", no special) I got the following result:
> >
> > File length in bytes:
> > text editor: 1
> > MS Word: 19456
> > MS Excel: 13824
>
> That's not at all astonishing. A text editor does not add any formatting
> information.
>
> Word and Excel add paper layout, font descriptions and what else... So what?

My intention was just to show how much the meta data and especially formatting data requires bytes compared to the actual data.
In my files the meta data requires some 3 pages of A4 size, unformatted text, 80 letters per line, 66 lines per page. Nothing
astonishing, just a note.
:-)

Anders

Re: OT: Word processing (was: Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada)

[AG]

"Anders Wirzenius" <anders.wirzenius@pp.qnet.fi> wrote in message
news:jeFJ9.148$j44.131@read3.inet.fi...
> "Grein, Christoph" <christoph.grein@eurocopter.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1039598282.30657.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...

> > > File length in bytes:
> > > text editor: 1
> > > MS Word: 19456
> > > MS Excel: 13824
> >
> > That's not at all astonishing. A text editor does not add any formatting
> > information.
> >
> > Word and Excel add paper layout, font descriptions and what else... So
what?

Perhaps you've missed the part where the files
contained the original author's name three times?
What exactly does it have to do with formatting?
Not to mention that 10k+ formatting info does
seem a bit too much for a single character file.

IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Richard Riehle]

Just announced today was the 2.1 billion dollar purchase
of Rational by IBM.   One can only wonder what will happen
to the Ada compiler products.   Things will either get better
or they will get worse.   Of  course, I think Norm Cohen still
works for IBM.  Perhaps he can make a difference.

Richard Riehle

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[achrist]

Memo is here:

http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1145

Al

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Richard Riehle]

achrist@easystreet.com wrote:

> Memo is here:
>
> http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1145
>

Alas, no hint of what will become of Rational Ada.   If anyone at IBM
realizes the power of the Rational Ada product, it could be great for
Ada and for IBM.   I wish I could be optimistic about this.

Richard Riehle

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Marin David Condic]

One would think that if IBM bought up Rational, they did so because they a)
thought it would be an important profit center and/or b) wanted to bring
important technology in-house where it could be better utilized and
compliment other products. If "A" is true, then the corporate guys won't
care much if the Rational division sells Ada compilers or grows tangerines -
just bring in the cash. In that case, Ada just needs to be a profitable
product or it deserves to be discontinued. If "B" is the case, then Ada as
one of Rational's products has to be some sort of "complimentary" product
that helps IBM sell its hardware. Here it is not so clear that IBM would
have a big incentive to keep it around since they are almost certainly more
interested in things like Rational Rose.

Still in all, it would make sense for IBM to sell off the compiler portion
to someone else if they weren't interested in it, so someone would likely
continue support. The point is that Ada must have some non-trivial
commercial potential in its own right or it won't really matter what IBM (or
anyone else) does with the compiler technology out there. If Rational is
keeping their product around as an "also ran" technology that has a handful
of followers that they simply want to keep happy, then IBM would be wise to
let it fade away. If Rational has found more than a handful of customers who
are actively buying the compiler, support, etc., then their Ada compiler is
a viable product that IBM would either continue to sell or at least sell off
to someone else.

I doubt this will have much of an impact on the future of Ada in the sense
that whatever happens is more a symptom of what is going on in the overall
industry, rather than a root cause. If Ada is to gain in popularity it has
to demonstrate more than just the availability of several compilers. It
needs to demonstrate measurable performance for the bottom line on corporate
balance sheets. (Lower costs, better quality, faster time to market, etc.)

Personally, I think the key is rapid development. Engineering costs usually
aren't the big drivers in most industries, but getting out the door faster
*is* a major advantage. To that end, better development kits around Ada,
bigger & better libraries and better access to underlying OS capabilities
are going to create development leverage that gets end-products out the
door. Maybe Ada is "A Better Mousetrap" but I think it has mostly gone after
the wrong mouse. Emphasis on standardization, portability and reliability
are all good things and might help push a sale over the edge, but the
industry seems to be willing to sacrifice all that in exchange for the
things that help them get to market faster.

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

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message
news:3DF2A483.EC512CDF@adaworks.com...
>
> Alas, no hint of what will become of Rational Ada.   If anyone at IBM
> realizes the power of the Rational Ada product, it could be great for
> Ada and for IBM.   I wish I could be optimistic about this.
>
> Richard Riehle
>

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[steve_H]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote in message  

>. Engineering costs usually
> aren't the big drivers in most industries, but getting out the door faster
> *is* a major advantage. To that end, better development kits around Ada,
> bigger & better libraries and better access to underlying OS capabilities
> are going to create development leverage that gets end-products out the
> door. 

This is like the chicken and egg problem. Ada won't get popular until
more packages are available. And no packages will be written to it if it
is not popular.

The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada support,
where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
and all the packages are there.

There is no other way left for Ada for it to become popular. All the
tricks and the speeches have been tried and said.

Commerical Ada compilers from closed commerical companies would make 
no difference to the popularity of a language.  (unless one can
buy it for $99.99 and have full IDE with it, etc.. Sorta like 
the TurboPascal days, which made Pascal the most popular language 
in its days).
 
It is not the few Ada programmers working inside Boeing or the defenss
department who will write those package for everyone to use, it is the 
open source programmers, the college students who want to make some 
impact, and the inspiring programmers who love to program and want
to spend the whole weekend coding for the love of it. Now those 
programmers turn to C and C++ and Java becuse it is everyone and free. Ada
full support in gcc makes Ada an option, and only then you will start to
see more Ada packages and more systems built with Ada. 

Ada has to grow from the bottom up (if it is to have a chane), from the 
masses up. Not from the officies of corporate America down to the
programmers. That is why I think rational rose Ada compiler, or any other
expensive commerical Ada compiler being there or not, will make no 
difference to the popularity of Ada. After all, we hade those for years,
and it did not make Ada any more popular.


just my 2 cents.

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Marin David Condic]

steve_H <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8db3d6c8.0212091445.12594821@posting.google.com...
>
> This is like the chicken and egg problem. Ada won't get popular until
> more packages are available. And no packages will be written to it if it
> is not popular.
>
But its a chicken and egg problem that has been solved before with other
languages. Granted, it takes resources of one kind or another, but building
the infrastructure *has* been done in the past so it *could* be done in the
future.


> The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada
support,
> where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
> installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
> and all the packages are there.
>
If you can only think of one way to solve a problem, you have not thought
about it long enough. :-)

I will grant you that if Ada were completely integrated into gcc so that
when you got it, it just plain worked right out of the box, that this would
help encourage use of Ada. I've stated here in the past similar things about
development kits. Sure, there are nice tools out there for Ada, but you've
got to go out on the net and get X and Y and Z all from different sources
and cobble them together into a patchwork of development tools and then,
maybe, you've got equivalent capabilities to what people might get right out
of the box from MSVC++ or Sun-Java. But that makes it *hard* and not very
pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
pointing them down the path of least resistance.

So, yes, integrating Ada fully into gcc would help. But that's not the total
answer.


> There is no other way left for Ada for it to become popular. All the
> tricks and the speeches have been tried and said.
>
Sure there is. Like I said, lots of different factors can contribute to
making Ada more popular - gcc integration being one of them. What is wrong
with the notion of looking at the Ada standard and the direction the
language takes as a possible mechanism for improving its popularity? I don't
think that the syntax or semantics of the language itself needs much
improvement, but what it *does* need is some sort of effort to create large
libraries of utilities that provide development leverage. (Libraries as a
"Convention" rather than a "Standard".) If something similar could be done
to give Ada a GUI interface that could be the "Convention" across a number
of platforms, that would help add development leverage. Anything that gives
a developer an edge in getting out the door faster is a help.

People I know who don't have some sort of knee-jerk, anti-Ada response will
often admit that the language has many superior qualities, but that they
can't/won't use it to develop their products because other languages give
them some significan leverage they just can't get with the average Ada
compiler. It may be a tough nut to crack, but if it isn't cracked, Ada will
forever be an interesting "also ran" language.


> Commerical Ada compilers from closed commerical companies would make
> no difference to the popularity of a language.  (unless one can
> buy it for $99.99 and have full IDE with it, etc.. Sorta like
> the TurboPascal days, which made Pascal the most popular language
> in its days).
>
Yes, commercial compilers can and will make a difference. Microsoft doesn't
give away MSVC++ and they don't open source it and yet it is a very popular
development environment. Why? IMHO, its because it provides tons of leverage
for getting a GUI based app out the door on a Windows platform. Granted,
commercial products must be within the reach of "The Masses" or Ada can
never become "The Language Of The Masses". ACT charges lots of money for
Gnat to its commercial customers, but makes the unsupported, older versions
available free of charge for The Masses. There are other Ada compilers out
there that are available at reasonable cost too. The thing is that they are
all too often trailing other compilers/IDEs in terms of features and end up
in the "also ran" category rather than getting out front and leading the way
with something truly "different".


> It is not the few Ada programmers working inside Boeing or the defenss
> department who will write those package for everyone to use, it is the
> open source programmers, the college students who want to make some
> impact, and the inspiring programmers who love to program and want
> to spend the whole weekend coding for the love of it. Now those
> programmers turn to C and C++ and Java becuse it is everyone and free. Ada
> full support in gcc makes Ada an option, and only then you will start to
> see more Ada packages and more systems built with Ada.
>
Speaking as someone inside the defense industry, I'll say this. The Defense
industry may not be the driving force behind Ada or what will make it
popular - we have too many specialized needs that don't line up well with
those from the "real world" - but the Defense industry is at least keeping
Ada on life support & providing it with the time it needs to gain in
popularity within the commercial and educational sectors.

Yes, the college kids who hack things together in the free software world
are going to make a contribution to the popularity of the language. Its just
that somewhere along the line, Ada has to find a way to pay the freight. It
has to have some amount of commercial success behind it or nobody is there
to pay the bills. When a student graduates from college will he go to work
for some company developing software and do it free of charge just for the
fun of it? Well compiler vendors are companies too and they've got to pay
those graduates something, don't they? So they'd better have some market for
their wares besides college-kid-hackers or they won't have much of a
business to support further development of tools for the language.


> Ada has to grow from the bottom up (if it is to have a chane), from the
> masses up. Not from the officies of corporate America down to the
> programmers. That is why I think rational rose Ada compiler, or any other
> expensive commerical Ada compiler being there or not, will make no
> difference to the popularity of Ada. After all, we hade those for years,
> and it did not make Ada any more popular.
>
We may be in partial agreement here - possibly for different reasons. Yes,
Rational's price for an Ada compiler has never been "Rational" - at least
from where I've sat in the purchasing seat. (Corporate as well as personal).
Lots of vendors were way over the line with prices back then. This *did*
hurt Ada in the early days. I looked at vendors way back when (who shall
remain nameless) and was awestruck at the testicular fortitude it took to
price a compiler in the $100,000 neighborhood and then further tell you that
it could only be run on some specialized machine that only they made and
that the compiler would only target that machine - thus making it a) totally
useless to me and b) way too expensive in comparison to what I could get
elsewhere. (When you could buy a development computer with Unix on it and it
came with a C compiler - and you could get a cross compiler for your target
as well - for a fraction of what they were asking, it got real easy to see
why the decision got made to go with C.)

Ground-up popularity is certainly important. Kids coming out of college who
know Ada and are impressed by it and want to use it will help make it
popular. Part-time hackers putting together free software will help it too.
But don't underestimate the value of being able to go to corporate America
and tell them "I can get you to market in 50% of the time with 4x fewer
defects..." If that sale gets made, that will be what pays the bills to
enable the students and hackers to go off and have some fun.

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

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> steve_H <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:8db3d6c8.0212091445.12594821@posting.google.com...
...
>>The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada
>>support,
>>where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
>>installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
>>and all the packages are there.
> 
> If you can only think of one way to solve a problem, you have not thought
> about it long enough. :-)

The other thing is that even when gcc fully includes Ada (gnat), the
packages/libraries may not necessarily be there (although there is a
greater chance of it now).

The problem is that when the user is shrink wrap
installing Linux for example, and asked whether or not it wants the
Ada packages or not, may look at the disk space requirement and say
"I don't need it". Over time, I would hope of course that people will
say instead "but I might need it to compile other Open Sourced
components". Disk space is getting cheaper, and as a result, maybe
that will even cease to be an option ;-)

> I will grant you that if Ada were completely integrated into gcc so that
> when you got it, it just plain worked right out of the box, that this would
> help encourage use of Ada. I've stated here in the past similar things about
> development kits. Sure, there are nice tools out there for Ada, but you've
> got to go out on the net and get X and Y and Z all from different sources
> and cobble them together into a patchwork of development tools and then,
> maybe, you've got equivalent capabilities to what people might get right out
> of the box from MSVC++ or Sun-Java. But that makes it *hard* and not very
> pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
> pointing them down the path of least resistance.

This is still a problem IMHO with Ada. I think the adapower site could
be better organized and more complete in this regard. But I don't like
to complain unless I can volunteer ;-)  Too much seems spread all over
the net (and I am guilty of this myself).  What adapower cannot host,
should perhaps have links to other Ada sites at least. I know that some
of this is there, but it seems rather incomplete.

> People I know who don't have some sort of knee-jerk, anti-Ada response will
> often admit that the language has many superior qualities, but that they
> can't/won't use it to develop their products because other languages give
> them some significan leverage they just can't get with the average Ada
> compiler. It may be a tough nut to crack, but if it isn't cracked, Ada will
> forever be an interesting "also ran" language.

There needs to be more "general purpose" quality bindings written. Some
of this is happening now that GNAT has been available, but like XFree86,
this effort takes time. It may be a pipe dream, but I still believe
in the possibility that we could see an Ada renaissance some day. As
pyramids of software are written, at some point, people are going to
start demanding that better quality foundations exist from which to
start building.

> Yes, the college kids who hack things together in the free software world
> are going to make a contribution to the popularity of the language. Its just
> that somewhere along the line, Ada has to find a way to pay the freight. 

It needs to exist in the workplace as an option. I can count on one
hand, then # of developers that are favourable to it in my career
circle. Young people need to start coming up from the ranks asking
to use it in projects.

> It
> has to have some amount of commercial success behind it or nobody is there
> to pay the bills. When a student graduates from college will he go to work
> for some company developing software and do it free of charge just for the
> fun of it? Well compiler vendors are companies too and they've got to pay
> those graduates something, don't they? So they'd better have some market for
> their wares besides college-kid-hackers or they won't have much of a
> business to support further development of tools for the language.

Part of the trouble is that many professors are selling "Java". In
part I can't blame them, for they need to prepare people for the
practicle realities of commercial development. OTOH, Ada is a much
better tool, assuming that the necessary library framework is there.

But IMHO, the library framework is not really there. AFAIK, even
Oracle has dropped support of the embedded Ada SQL precompiler. For
other databases, there exists no support at all for Ada. For my
own needs, I needed to write a better PostgreSQL binding (see
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg/software.html for APQ). The problem
is that not everyone has time to write new bindings (nor can
everyone do a good job of it). We have GtkAda, but it is not a
perfect solution yet (its difficult to compile on some platforms,
and may not be fully supported from a commercial requirements
perspective). So I think a better "commercial support" set of
packages and libraries is needed for more general purpose use.
Ada's standard packages are still rather primitive for daily
use in a general purpose environment (just look at Ada.Calendar
for example -- you cannot determine the day of the week from
the API given).

> Ground-up popularity is certainly important. Kids coming out of college who
> know Ada and are impressed by it and want to use it will help make it
> popular. Part-time hackers putting together free software will help it too.
> But don't underestimate the value of being able to go to corporate America
> and tell them "I can get you to market in 50% of the time with 4x fewer
> defects..." If that sale gets made, that will be what pays the bills to
> enable the students and hackers to go off and have some fun.
> 
> MDC

One other way Ada could become more popular, is to have an O/S
based upon it (the O/S would need to become popular of course).
In this way, the Ada API would be more natural,
and C programs (for example) would have to write their own bindings
to the Ada APIs. This would tend to encourage Ada source code ;-)

However, this is not likely to happen any time soon, because too
much has been written and expected (like Xlib, XFree86 etc.) that
is now written in C.

The ironic thing is that it might happen that our kids or grandkids
may be the ones that finally recognize Ada for what it is. It is
like some scientists and their discoveries -- they are never
really appreciated in their own lifetimes.
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Wes Groleau]

>> pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
>> pointing them down the path of least resistance.

That, unfortunately is a bigger key than just with libraries.

With C, you can lean on the keyboard and almost generate
something that will compile.   Many people will dump Ada
about the fifth time their program is rejected.  They'll
never get far enough to find out that it would have had
fewer errors.

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Wes Groleau wrote:
>>> pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
>>> pointing them down the path of least resistance.
> 
> That, unfortunately is a bigger key than just with libraries.
> 
> With C, you can lean on the keyboard and almost generate
> something that will compile.   Many people will dump Ada
> about the fifth time their program is rejected.  They'll
> never get far enough to find out that it would have had
> fewer errors.

It is true that learning to do things the "Ada way" will
create some frustration in beginners. However, I can say
that I am always grateful for what the compiler finds up
front.

The challenge is to educate people that fighting with
the compiler is much preferred over looking
for memory leaks and other odd corruption problems.  In other
words quality time spent with your Ada compiler is much
less than the quality time you spend with your debugger.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg

Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[steve_H]

"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in message news:<3DF6653D.3030603@cogeco.ca>...
 
> It is true that learning to do things the "Ada way" will
> create some frustration in beginners. However, I can say
> that I am always grateful for what the compiler finds up
> front.
> 

I think this is a way similar to the Latex vs Word debate. Let 
Latex be Ada here and MS Word be C.

It is much easier to write a quick something in MS Word. Just open
the document and start typing. 

It takes more time to first learn Latex, few commands to learn, and more
advanced commands, and one has to compile it and then view it. However,
if one invests the time to learn Latex, and get all the commands right, 
then their final output will be so much better than the 'quick' 
MS Word can ever generate, and it is a great investment that will 
pay multiples over a life time. And actually with time, one will find the
producing documents with Latex is faster.

But most will not spend the few short days to learn Latex initially, (will 
get either frustrated quickly, or would not even try it as it 'looks' hard) 
and will insead spend their life producing ugly documents with MS Word.





> The challenge is to educate people that fighting with
> the compiler is much preferred over looking
> for memory leaks and other odd corruption problems.  In other
> words quality time spent with your Ada compiler is much
> less than the quality time you spend with your debugger.

OT: Word processing (was: Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada)

[Anders Wirzenius]

"steve_H" <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:8db3d6c8.0212101850.51506572@posting.google.com...
> It takes more time to first learn Latex, few commands to learn, and more
> advanced commands, and one has to compile it and then view it. However,
> if one invests the time to learn Latex, and get all the commands right,
> then their final output will be so much better than the 'quick'
> MS Word can ever generate, and it is a great investment that will
> pay multiples over a life time. And actually with time, one will find the
> producing documents with Latex is faster.
>
> But most will not spend the few short days to learn Latex initially, (will
> get either frustrated quickly, or would not even try it as it 'looks' hard)
> and will insead spend their life producing ugly documents with MS Word.
>

A side note:
I made three files, one with a MS Notepad, one with MS Word, one with MS Excel. With each program I stored only the letter 'A'.
Using the current settings that are used in my company (just ordinary "Windows settings", no special) I got the following result:

File length in bytes:
text editor: 1
MS Word: 19456
MS Excel: 13824

This means over 10k of meta and formatting data in addition to the actual data.
The Excel file contained my name three times, the Word file only two times.

Anders