RE: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

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

I have just spent a total of 12 of hours trying to open a file with Windows
XP Professional. This file was created under Windows 98 and still opens
under 98. The customers would flock to something that worked! 
In case this bug happens to anyone else, shorten the file names under an old
version of Windows. Evidently XP has a constraint that does not exist in the
older versions. Although XP has not crashed itself, many applications still
crash including Windows Explorer. Rebooting once a day is a reasonable means
of eliminating pointer garbage. Ada needs commercial products. 
Bob Leif

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org [mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]
On Behalf Of Bill Findlay
Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 8:43 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

On 3/1/03 02:56, in article av2u64$qj$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net, "Marin
David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote:

> Machismo may be interesting, but nobody is going to be fooled by empty,
> shallow, marketing for very long.

It was a joke, Marin.

> Eventually, they open the box up and see the same old Ada and word gets
out.

"Same old Ada"? For all practical purposes Ada 95 is the same age as Java.

"Word gets out"? What word is that? Are you saying that there are serious
unacknowledged technical defects in Ada 95?

Opposition to Ada in comp.arch fell into three categories, which I parody
(grotesquely unfairly, I admit 8-) as follows:
(1) "We don't care about software quality. We make money selling ****
written in C, and that's fine with us."
(2) "We do care about software quality. We write our software in C (or
other, even less safe, languages) and ensure its quality by being faultless
programmers and superior human beings. Ada is for talentless losers."
(3) "Ada is too low-level. Our favourite language is Functional-Telepathy/1,
which generates an optimal program for you while you are still thinking
about the specification. It should be implemented real soon now."

Depressingly, type (1) critics were in a majority. When shown evidence (the
Rational data) that Ada could help them to make even more money, the
response was "I don't believe it"; taken even to the point of suggesting
that Rational had fabricated their figures. In other words: "I've no
evidence of my own, so I'll find reasons to ignore yours".

The intensity of denial was astonishing.

Type (2) and type (3) critics tended to post from academic domains (no
surprise 8-), although academia did not have a monopoly on false pride.

It's interesting that essentially no-one objected to Ada on the grounds of
technical or pragmatic issues such as are are openly discussed here.

> I don't think Ada is *bad* -

That's damming with faint praise. I think Ada 95 is very, very good indeed.

> but it sure has a problem selling itself with "reliability", etc.
> That's why I've become
> convinced that a new emphasis and new tools might do a better job of
getting
> Ada accepted. I'd be happy to be proven wrong - that all we really had to
do
> was change the name and use some more cosmetics - but I don't think that's
> the case.

Why do you care whether anyone adopts Ada, if "reliability, etc" is not the
primary concern? I look at this the other way round. I want the general
level of software quality to rise, and I believe that better understanding
and wider adoption of Ada would promote this objective. I'm more than happy
to make common cause with anyone, such as yourself, who has ideas about how
to make that happen. But I do not think that it is Ada that is the barrier;
and I do think that the barrier is fairly impenetrable. 8-(
-- 
Bill-Findlay chez blue-yonder.co.uk ("-" => "")