Re: += in ada

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

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"Russ" <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com> wrote in message
news:bebbba07.0310212256.6bdd348d@posting.google.com...
>
> Naw ... I don't believe it!

*** And I don't believe you ;-).  No pun intended.   But from my research,
Marin is right. well not 100% right but the part he explains is very real.
Other than that, Ada compiler vendors lacked a good sales department at the
time.  Like OS/2 (which was far better than Windows at the time, hands down,
for all the right reasons, didn't have Bill Gates (so to speak). If they
did, we'd probably all be on OS/2 today.  The same goes for Ada.  If Ada
started out as Ada 95 back when it first came out and not Ada 80 or 83, I'm
sure things would be very different.

*** Before Windows 2000 and XP, why do you supposed Windows was so popular?
Better than OS/2 ?  I sincerely don't think so.  a good part of it was
marketing.  The other part was the problems computer vendors had ridding
themselves of Windows, Talk to Compaq, and other computer manufacturers,
Compaq, a couple years ago, attempted to provide Linux as their base OS
instead of windows.  that was a bad mistake, not in the eyes of computer
users, but in the eyes of Microsoft it was.  Anyone here remember hearing
about that?  And now AMD or Pheonix (don't remember which) are making BIOS
that are Windows only?  Wonder what number on the check was needed to make
that happen? ;-).

*** I've been in the computer industry for 12 years professionally so far,
and about 27 years on a personal basis (since the micro-computer hit the
market back in 1976)...I've had a chance to follow through the evolution of
the PC and software industry And this situation I've seen happen for more
than Just Ada.

>
> > reputation right out of the starting gate. This reputation spread like
> > wildfire and has been *enormously* hard to overcome. Some of it is
> > reality and some of it is myth, but in the world of "Marketing" -
> > "Perception *IS* Reality".
> >
*** I agree with this.  See my Windows and OS/2 statement above.

> That's all very interesting, but the fact is that Ada was mandated by
> the DoD for much more than just embedded systems. My understanding is
> that it was mandated for pretty much everything, right down to
> personnel management and payroll systems.
>
*** They could have done that with Pascal at the time without a problem.
From my readings They were looking for Safety critical, realtime,
multi-tasking and embedded capabilities payrolls and personelle maangement
came after the language was created (I guess they figure hey we got the
language, let's use it ;-).  But I dont beleieve it was created to
accomodate accounting functionalities as any other languages could have
taken care of that at the time :-).

> So here you had a $300,000,000,000/year behemoth driving the adoption
> of a particular programming language like nothing we've ever seen
> before or since -- and never will, for that matter. That in itself
> blows all the excuses out of the water as far as I am concerned. Think
> about it. If the DoD spent only 1% of its budget on software, that was
> approximately $3,000,000,000/year going directly to Ada development.
> And I'll bet they spend *much* more than 1%.
>
*** Again with this paragraph you just prove Marin's point.  Think about it
too :-).  But what I'm reading here is "You got the best language there ever
was, is, and ever will be"  but like many other projects, they didn't have
the marketing power they needed and as Marin says, "Perception really is
reality"  But that's not the only reason why.  There was a "copycat" effect
from Project managers in the corporate world that decided to go with VB, or
C or C++ for only one reasons, their allies or competition were using these
languages.  They didn't bother doign any serious research on what language
would be best suited for the job, if any of them would do the research, We'd
be readign about C in our history books.  Because 60% (at least, I'm being
pecimist here) of the people and companies using C and C++ aren't doing so
because C++ is good (I'm not saying it's not good, I'm saying it's not the
reason why it was selected).  They used C++ because:

Corporately:
a. It was imposed upon them by their Project managers, I've seen this happen
many times, and the PM again didn't do research, he just used the copy cat
effect and used whatever the others were using.

b. Since C and C++ was used, then newcomers to programming, who wanted a
job, looked at the papers and noticed that there was a lot of C++ in demand,
well what else would they learn if they wanted to work?


*** To me, these are not the right reasons to select a language, it was the
"easy way out" for the corporate world.  Since people learned C and C+++ to
assure themselves a job (again for wrong reasons the corporations were using
C and C++ so if you wanted to work there, you had to know C and C++.  That
doesn't make it Good or Better.  It makes it the only choice.  Call it a
form of corporate dictatorship if you will.

*** For personal programmers working on their own games for example:  google
for game development, and C++ pops up.  for the same reasons because others
used it for Games programming, newcomers that want to make a game go by what
they see, not by what they should see.  so fi they search for game engines,
C++ is bound to popup.  they'll try to do their game in C++ because they
want to use that engine.  Again understand that I'm not sayign that C++ is
not a good choice for games, I'm saying that programmers aren't choosing C++
because it's good, they are choosing it because it's what others have
chosen.  They dont ask the other programmers why did you choose it or try to
find out why it's popular.  Which again proves Marin's point that Perception
Is Reality.


> You know I agree that Ada is a fundamentally sound language. If it's
> half as good as we think it is, and if it is so much more productive
> than C and C++, why aren't the masses who were forced to use it now
> singing its praises? Something else is going on here, and I think most
> of you here are blind to that reality. You can ridicule me all you
> want about ":=" and "+=", but I think the last laugh will be on you
> when the reality of Ada's demise finally hits you.

*** Ada's Demise? Blasphemis.  I see C++ and other language users switching
to Ada, but I don't see Ada developers switching to something else!!! ;-).
If you're still posting on this newsgroup in 5 to 10 years (max), you'll be
giving us your most sincere apologies :-).  Again no pun intended Russ, but
that's just my prediction.

*** More and more corporate people I've talked to, worked in or heard about
(from friends) are getting fed up with never being able to meet deadlines
because there's either problems with the code and the compilers they use,
or, because of upgradability problems  What are they using? C++
:-)...Microsoft did a research on this...results?  C#  Now c# is a mistake
in it's definition.  It's a Javatized C++ dialect.  It is far from getting
the success they thought it would but at least they seem to think that C++
days are counted since they are trying to create an alternative language.
What forced them to do so?

*** Portability was another issue (a programmer I worked with created a
whole system in Linux using what was described as standard C++. When he went
to compile that in Visual C++ he had to change 50% at least of his code to
get it to compile).

*** All Ada needs is a good marketing effort, and from what I hear, it's
about to get just that, we'll talk after and see what happens :-).

-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com