RE: Microsoft .Net, Ada should be at the head of this list

["Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Marin Condic et al.
I totally agree. I would also like to add that Ada has very significant
commercial advantages beyond the obvious technological ones. 1) It can
be created in a distribute environment. I have been in the Microsoft
buildings. Bill Gate's builds very good buildings. However, they are
expensive. In a distributed environment, there is virtually no building
cost overhead. 2) As I have proposed, one can build a program based on
ASIS to divide up the royalties. 3) Ada is exotic. One could hype the
technology.

Ada has only one problem, its culture. Ada started with defense
contractors, who are notoriously bad at technology transfer and have
minimal entrepreneurial skills. Yes, the responsibility for the lack of
use and profit from this remarkable technology is ours. 

For instance, has any Ada compiler vendor investigated putting their
compiler on the Microsoft.Net list? 

1. R. C. Leif, "SIGAda '98, Workshop: How do We Expedite the Commercial
Use of Ada?." Ada letters XIX, No 1 pp. 28-39 (1999).

2. R. C. Leif, "Ada Developers Cooperative License (Draft) Version 0.3",
Ada letters XIX, No 1 pp. 97-107 (1999).

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org] On Behalf Of Marin David Condic
Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2002 6:04 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Microsoft .Net, Ada should be at the head of this list

Why is that exclusive of competing with Microsoft? Last time I checked,
things like Linux compete with Microsoft. Gnat is a product that
competes
(to some extent, at least) against MSVC++, doesn't it? Just because a
product is Open Source, doesn't mean it isn't a product that competes
against Microsoft - or that it can't be sold for profit.

And its also fair to note at this juncture that while there is a
reasonable
amount of complaining here about lack of jobs in Ada, has it occurred to
anyone that unless there is some entrepreneurial spirit that starts up
businesses to produce products that use Ada in their design &
production,
there will *never* be any Ada jobs out there? At the moment, the guys
who
are dreaming up the latest & greatest computer whozits & finding ways of
producing those things for profit, tend to think in terms of Java and
C++.
Hence, you see thousands of small to medium sized companies all around
the
country looking for Java and C++ programmers. Nobody is going to take
their
existing products and convert them to Ada just because we think that's
cool - *new* things have to be started in Ada and that isn't going to
happen
unless some Ada-philes dream up products to take to market.

But I suppose we can all be intellectually opposed to finding a way of
making anything with Ada that will generate a profit and then
paradoxically
sit around here complaining about the lack of Ada jobs. Its not very
constructive, but at least its amusing. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Preben Randhol" <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:slrnafs1ro.aa1.randhol+abuse@kiuk0152.chembio.ntnu.no...
> > Anybody interested in tilting at some windmills? :-)
>
> Heheh no I want to make software that I am free to use.
>
> "Don't think about domination, think about freedom, it doesn't
dominate."
>                                                     - Richard M.
Stallman
>