Re: Ada, the best language with the not-so-best tool chain

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Simon Clubley" <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote in 
message news:k4ve02$g5a$1@dont-email.me...
...
> You are still thinking like a professional engineer doing safety
> critical work on large systems. :-)
>
> To understand what people like me are telling you, you need to start
> thinking like a hobbyist interested in things like robotics and paying
> for their experiments out of their own pockets.

I hate to break this to you, but no *professional developer* cares what a 
"hobbyist" needs for software development. AdaCore has made a lot of useful 
things available, but all of those were developed for big, paying, 
professional developers.

Those of us in the software business can't develop things only needed by 
hobbyists (who aren't likely to be able to pay for it) -- what are we going 
to do to pay for our groceries, our gas, our mortgage, etc.? We can only 
build things needed by paying customers, and hopefully those will be useful 
for others as well.

There's an old saying: "beggars can't be choosers". That surely applies to 
"free software". Either pay for it, build it yourself (or convince some 
other hobbyist to build it for you), or use what's available.

In any case, I've never heard of Ada being seriously used on 8-bit 
processors. Ever! Our old Z-80 compiler (for a subset of Ada 83) was 
certainly 8-bit, but I don't recall anyone using it as an embedded system. 
We did have customers for our 16-bit 8086 compilers (usually on 186 boards) 
to develop bare machine products (mostly in the late 1980's and ealry 
1990's). Today, as Dmitry has noted, paying customers are only interested in 
various RTOSes; no one seems interested in bare machines (for any target). I 
personally think this is sad; an Ada run-time is all the RTOS that you need 
for most purposes -- but fighting the market is a losing game.

After all, nothing is truely "free"; you *always* pay for it somehow. Either 
in a lack of functionality, or by loss of privacy (think ads), or by a loss 
of competion (by forcing competitors out of the market), or by folding it 
into the price of something else (hardware boards).

                            Randy.