Re: Embeddinator-4000 begetting an Ada-cross-platform future?

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

"Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net> wrote in message 
news:e067f080-1eb6-4c23-82cf-408cac90a813@googlegroups.com...
>Shark8 wrote:
>> Turbo Pascal proved that a company could thrive by targeting 
>> small-businesses
>> and hobbyists with relatively cheap compilers.

>Well, yes, but back in 1983 the bar was set very low though.  Philipe 
>Kahn's
> TurboPascal only needed to be better than Microsoft's BASICA or
> GWBASIC .interpreters. (and better than Waterloo BASIC .interpreters.
> largely only on fellow-Canadian Commodore) and better than UCSD
> p-System Pascal's p-code .virtual machine..

That's not quite true, there were quite a few other options back then, 
including the $30 JRT Pascal and a variety of Ada subset compilers 
(including relatively inexpensive versions of Janus/Ada). Janus/Ada surely 
was a compiler-to-machine-code then (it always was, the interpreted version 
never left the lab).

What TurboPascal did better than anyone else is play the marketing game with 
a product that was "good enough". JRT for instance was well marketed but was 
rather limited. We (RRS = Janus/Ada) didn't do a very good job of the 
marketing game, and even if we had, I have to wonder if the product really 
was "good enough" (the cheap product probably wasn't, and the expensive one 
was too expensive -- we eventually got that right, but I think that was 
after the advent of TurboPascal).

In any case, the situation today is wildly different. As Dan'l said, many of 
the users bought Turbo Pascal because it was "good enough" and cheap. But 
today, one can get various compilers that are "good enough" and *free*. 
There is no real market for a $99 compiler today because someone can get 
something just as good for free -- why spend the money? (And the support for 
a $99 compiler necessarily has to be limited, meaning that it can't be much 
better than what you can get with a newsgroup like this one.)

The existence of GNAT effectively put RR Software out of business; a large 
part of our revenue came from being the lowest-cost Ada option, but of 
course one cannot compete with free. And we never had enough high-end 
business to survive on that alone. (That probably happened in part by trying 
to be the lowest-cost option, which caused reputational issues.)

I doubt that anyone could recapture the environment of the 1980s for any 
programming language -- a free option would appear way too quickly to pay 
back your investment.

                                                 Randy.