is ada dead?

is ada dead?

[tyler spivey]

is ada dead?
is it only used in department of defense?
is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

tyler spivey wrote:
> 
> is ada dead?
No.
> is it only used in department of defense?
No.
> is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?
No.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Gerhard Häring]

I hesitate to respond to such posts, but here it goes:

On Thu, 05 Jul 2001 21:56:32 GMT, tyler spivey wrote:
>is ada dead?

Not at all.

>is it only used in department of defense?

No, though defense projects are probably still the field most Ada developers
work in.

>is it easy/hard to learn?

Depends. The programming language Ada isn't harder to learn than comparable
languages. New concepts are hard to learn. If you already know the concepts,
any programming language that implements this concepts is just yet another
programming language. Such concepts would be for example:

- Object-oriented programming
- Generic programming
- Multithreaded programming
- typesafe programming

>will it die soon?

If you really are interested in Ada, you should check out the site
http://www.adapower.com/ It should answer most of your questions.

Gerhard
-- 
mail:   gerhard <at> bigfoot <dot> de       registered Linux user #64239
web:    http://highqualdev.com              public key at homepage
public key fingerprint: DEC1 1D02 5743 1159 CD20  A4B6 7B22 6575 86AB 43C0
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))

Re: is ada dead?

[wzm]

tspivey8@home.com (tyler spivey) wrote in message news:<ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>...
> is ada dead?
> is it only used in department of defense?
> is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?

No,you are wrong!
Ada is growing now.
And its use has extended to the fields beyond department of
defense,e.g.embeded system,how wonderful it is!And Ada is best for
embeded system.
It's easy to Learn Ada,because the language itself is easy;but maybe
hard,because of its so many language points.
If have a taste of Ada,you will know what you will do!

Re: is ada dead?

[Pascal Obry]

tspivey8@home.com (tyler spivey) writes:

> is ada dead?
> is it only used in department of defense?
> is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?

This question read like a "7 years" old question ! We have not had such
strange wording about Ada since a long time !

Anyway, all answers are NO.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: is ada dead?

[Martin Dowie]

I've been doing a little monitoring off jobs on
www.jobserve.co.uk and Ada is the only language
in my sample showing any signs of _increased_
use of the last 6 weeks!

Java   down ~25%
C++    down ~17%
COBOL  down ~10%

C#     static
Pascal static

Ada95  up   ~33%

This follows the trend spotted by Computer Weekly
in their quarterly job review (Ada up by
40+%/40+%/25%+ in the last 3 quarters - and the
only language to show 3 consecutive quarters of
growth).

Obviously C++/Java are starting from a much larger
base but COBOL is now only twice as popular as Ada
(in the job advert stake anyway).

I haven't done any "proper" analysis - just counted
the ads, but my assumptions are as invalid for one
language as they are for any other, so I would hope
that the trend is really following what is happening
out there in the UK adverts! :-)

If anyone is interested I can keep the newsgroup
posted as to how this sampling is going.

Perhaps the compiler vendors could chips in with
indications of how they see the market going? ;-)

As for defence only, it was recently reported (CW
again?) that 1/3 of new Ada jobs are in telecoms...

tyler spivey <tspivey8@home.com> wrote in message
news:ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com...
>
> is ada dead?
> is it only used in department of defense?
> is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?

Re: is ada dead?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

In article <3b45a8fb$1@pull.gecm.com>, "Martin Dowie"
<martin.dowie@nospam.baesystems.com> wrote:


> Java   down ~25%

Sadly, the CS department here is just starting a push to standardize the
curriculum on Java, apparently on the dubious logic that "it's the
industry standard".  Even if that were true now, it's hardly likely to
be true when the current crop of freshmen graduate.

I just can't understand the /langue de jour/ mentality.  And besides...
I meet more Perl programmers than Java programmers.  I hope the CS
department doesn't decide to switch to Perl as the primary language of
instruction!

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

Yup. Ada is dead. That's why there is absolutely no activity on this
newsgroup. :-)

But seriously: Lurk on this group for a while. You'll discover that a) lots
of people use Ada, b) it is not just for the DoD anymore (if anything quite
the opposite) and c) it is easy to learn and fun to use. The full language
is very rich, so don't expect to become a pro overnight, but you can easily
pick up a subset dialect of it very quickly.

Check out http://www.adapower.org/ for lots of Ada resources. For some
indication of who is using Ada, visit:
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/success/Who_s_Using_Ada.html
For a quick start in getting to know Ada, see:
http://www.learnada.com/index.htm where Bard Crawford has some excellent
materials. There are lots of online tutorials, etc as well. Just get to
Google and type "Learn Ada" or similar stuff or visit AdaPower where lots of
resources exist. You're always welcome to visit my homepage where there are
links & Ada resources as well.

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

"tyler spivey" <tspivey8@home.com> wrote in message
news:ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com...
>
> is ada dead?
> is it only used in department of defense?
> is it easy/hard to learn? wil it die soon?

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2845 bytes --]

I obviously cannot vouch for the accuracy of someone else's web site. I
offered the link as someplace that would have some information about
companies using Ada. How up to date is it? I'd contact the site owner. I
don't know of any other more up to date sources offhand.

The AdaPower website is where one should start for finding info about Ada -
including who might be using it. There are a lot of links there to follow
for more information. Other sources of info would possibly be SIGAda
http://www.acm.org/sigada/ and some of the links you may find on my web page
(See: http://www.mcondic.com/)

Just for grins, here are a whole bunch of links I've got in my bookmarks -
in no particular order.

http://www.adapower.org/
http://www.adaos.org/
http://www.gnuada.org/alt.html
http://www.gnat.com/
http://www.ghs.com/
http://www.oarcorp.com/
http://www2.dynamite.com.au/aebrain/ADACASE.HTM
http://www.tcsigada.org/meeting/feb99mtg.htm
http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/adamindstorms.htm
http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/bios/mcc_html/adagide.html
http://www.gnuada.org/
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/department/cse/research/grasp/
http://ctrpc17.ctr.unican.es/marte.html
http://home.t-online.de/home/Christ-Usch.Grein/Ada/
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/aug/mccormick.asp
http://www.science-books.net/ada.htm
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry/contrib.html
http://members.nbci.com/ldulman/vad.htm
http://home.trouwweb.nl/Jerry/
http://www.chez.com/bignumber/index.html
http://burks.bton.ac.uk/
http://libre.act-europe.fr/
http://www.acm.org/sigada/ada_letters/
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/conference/AE2001/program.html#speak
http://www.ccur.com/vod/index.htm
http://www.abssw.com/
http://www.acm.org/sigada/
http://www-inf.enst.fr/ANC/
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/success/Who_s_Using_Ada.html

All these pages had something to do with Ada. Undoubtedly there are a lot
more, but this is just what was in my collection of bookmarks at the moment.
Enjoy!

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

"Tapio Marjom�ki" <tapio.marjomaki@nokia.com> wrote in message
news:3B45E0E9.E3E7BB55@nokia.com...
Marin  David Condic wrote:
"
For some
indication of who is using Ada, visit:
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/success/Who_s_Using_Ada.html
"
There is mentioned something about Nokia.
"Finland         Nokia Information Systems: online banking systems."
Would there be anywhere available more fresh statistic than that above ...
As far as I know Nokia does not nowadays use Ada,
but has used  in the 1980's, when it (we) tried to do a 32-bit supermini,
but we were too much ahead of time.. or something...
Tapio Marjom�ki,
Software Designer

Re: is ada dead?

[Robert Dewar]

tspivey8@home.com (tyler spivey) wrote in message news:<ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>...

> is ada dead?

  Hardly, there are many thousands of people making their living
  with Ada these days. A useful thing to remember is that in this
  field, for some reason, if a technology is not dominant, people
  assume it is dead (e.g. people often think of PL/1, OS/2, Pascal,
  Forth etc being dead [all are widely used], and I have even met
  people who thought COBOL was dead [COBOL is still one of the most
  widely used languages]). It's not like that in other fields, no
  one thinks that the Rolls Royce is dead just because they don't
  see thousands of them everywhere.

> is it only used in department of defense?

  Not unless the DoD has much wider influence than I thought and is
  for example in charge of running the cable movie business in France
  (Canal Plus), Air Traffic Control systems all over the world (Vision
  Systems), Internet routing technology (TopLayer), Commercial aviation    
  (Boeing), and Medical Instrumentation (JEOL), just to name a few
  examples.

> is it easy/hard to learn?

  Easier than most languages, for three reasons:

    1. The language is designed to make it easy to read programs,
       which is very useful everywhere, but especially for learning
       it makes examples easier to understand.

    2. Compilers are available which give very good error messages.

    3. At run-time, many beginner's errors are immediately detected
       with clear messages, rather than causing mysterious chaos

> wil it die soon?

   Not clear that any language dies out completely, but Ada is not
   about to disappear any time soon (some of the contracts our company
   has expect to need support for 20 years just on the current    
   projects), and new projects are starting up in Ada all the time.

Re: is ada dead?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

tyler spivey wrote:

> is ada dead?

Yes. It seems no one lives forever.  In the case of Ada,
Countess of Lovelace, she died sometime around 1854.

Richard Riehle

Re: is ada dead?

[Adrian Hoe]

Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message news:<3B460DA9.C2965042@ix.netcom.com>...
> tyler spivey wrote:
> 
> > is ada dead?
> 
> Yes. It seems no one lives forever.  In the case of Ada,
> Countess of Lovelace, she died sometime around 1854.
> 
> Richard Riehle



Ada is dead in Malaysia. One of UTM's (University of Technology
Malaysia) KL campus was teaching and promoting Ada with a lot of
confidence couple years ago when they were a joint-venture with
Thomson CSF. Recently, I found that they had deserted Ada and switch
to Java for the reason that there is no Ada market in Malaysia.
ANother reason came from one of the senior lecturer was that Ada was
too old. I told the senior lecturer I could not believe what he was
saying because they were so confident about Ada.

So, is Ada dead in Malaysia? I don't know how many Malaysians have
joint CLA, but I will say that Ada is not dead in Malaysia.

Reason? UTM's main campus in JB is teaching Ada in general and real
time programming and there are as many as 120 students right now, yes,
today!

Lexical Integration (M) Sdn Bhd, the company I work with, although not
as agressive as 4-5 years ago, still promoting Ada. Our R&D division
uses Ada for research projects. 100% of all works in Lexical are using
Ada. Lexical Integration will emerge as Ada authority in Malaysia in
no time to come and that's our ultimate goal!

Ada is a programming language appreciated by engineers who know the
benefits. Java is a programming language appreciated by people who
likes to read ads and listen to marketing persuasion. I do not intend
to flame Java. It is a language with its own benefits and strength.
This is what actually happened in Malaysia. People likes to follow the
newest trends.

In universities (Malaysian, Ok?), programming languages are taught not
because of teching the students of programming concepts, but for the
sake of market requirement. That's the most pathetic and irresponsible
decision.

Adrian
Just my 2 cents worth!

Re: is ada dead?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

In article <9ff447f2.0107061757.34ca0723@posting.google.com>, "Adrian
Hoe" <byhoe@greenlime.com> wrote:


> Ada is a programming language appreciated by engineers who know the
> benefits. Java is a programming language appreciated by people who
> likes to read ads and listen to marketing persuasion.

It looks to me that the family C, C++, Java, and C# show a teleological
evolutionary trend toward becoming an Ada clone.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: is ada dead?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <9i6lak$bqi$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> writes:
> In article <9ff447f2.0107061757.34ca0723@posting.google.com>, "Adrian
> Hoe" <byhoe@greenlime.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Ada is a programming language appreciated by engineers who know the
>> benefits. Java is a programming language appreciated by people who
>> likes to read ads and listen to marketing persuasion.
> 
> It looks to me that the family C, C++, Java, and C# show a teleological
> evolutionary trend toward becoming an Ada clone.

I don't think they will ever forsake their null-terminated strings.

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> 
> In article <9i6lak$bqi$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> writes:
> > It looks to me that the family C, C++, Java, and C# show a teleological
> > evolutionary trend toward becoming an Ada clone.
> 
> I don't think they will ever forsake their null-terminated strings.

That may be true for C, but C++ now has a String class, which is not
just a wrapper for the more primitive C strings. Java has a String
class which is also not null termintated. The Java String class is
closer to an Ada Unbounded string, with everything dynamically
allocated. 

Of course, the Java String suffers from the same inefficiencies as 
an Ada Unbounded string. For instance, you cannot edit a Java String.
There are Java methods to change the value of a character at a
specified position. The result, however, is not strictly an edited
string. It is an entirely new string, with all the characters copied
and the edited character replacing the original. In other words, if
you want to loop through all the characters in an existing 1024
character String, replacing each one, you will require the creation
and garbage collection of 1024 1024 character strings. Since Java
characters are all 16 bits, this means that you need to chew up
over 2 Megabytes of data to edit a 1024 character String.

Clearly, Java has abandoned the C null terminated string. Clearly
they have also abandoned any approximation of efficiency in String
handling.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

String support (was: is Ada dead?)

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <3B475916.E4548A5D@worldnet.att.net>, James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:

> Larry Kilgallen wrote:
>> 
>> In article <9i6lak$bqi$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> writes:
>> > It looks to me that the family C, C++, Java, and C# show a teleological
>> > evolutionary trend toward becoming an Ada clone.
>> 
>> I don't think they will ever forsake their null-terminated strings.
> 
> That may be true for C, but C++ now has a String class, which is not
> just a wrapper for the more primitive C strings.

Let me know when they drop all support for the C-style strings :-)

> Of course, the Java String suffers from the same inefficiencies as 
> an Ada Unbounded string. For instance, you cannot edit a Java String.
> There are Java methods to change the value of a character at a
> specified position. The result, however, is not strictly an edited
> string. It is an entirely new string, with all the characters copied
> and the edited character replacing the original. In other words, if
> you want to loop through all the characters in an existing 1024
> character String, replacing each one, you will require the creation
> and garbage collection of 1024 1024 character strings. Since Java
> characters are all 16 bits, this means that you need to chew up
> over 2 Megabytes of data to edit a 1024 character String.

That seems like an implementation detail that could be done in a more
efficient fashion.  from your description, I see no reason why some
implementor could not do better.

Re: is ada dead?

[Stephen J. Bevan]

James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> In other words, if
> you want to loop through all the characters in an existing 1024
> character String, replacing each one, you will require the creation
> and garbage collection of 1024 1024 character strings. Since Java
> characters are all 16 bits, this means that you need to chew up
> over 2 Megabytes of data to edit a 1024 character String.

You could do it like that.  However, it would be more efficient to
turn your String into a StringBuffer, which supports in-place updates.
Make all the changes you want to the StringBuffer and then turn it
back into a String.  This way you'd only chew up approximately 3K.

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

"Stephen J. Bevan" wrote:
> 
> James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> > In other words, if
> > you want to loop through all the characters in an existing 1024
> > character String, replacing each one, you will require the creation
> > and garbage collection of 1024 1024 character strings. Since Java
> > characters are all 16 bits, this means that you need to chew up
> > over 2 Megabytes of data to edit a 1024 character String.
> 
> You could do it like that.  However, it would be more efficient to
> turn your String into a StringBuffer, which supports in-place updates.
> Make all the changes you want to the StringBuffer and then turn it
> back into a String.  This way you'd only chew up approximately 3K.

No, this is approximately 6k. Remember that every Java character
requires 2 bytes.

Yes. The Stringbuffer class is much more efficient than the String
class for editing purposes. It is still terribly inefficient 
compared to, for instance, Ada strings.

Remember the extra processing overhead needed to use a StringBuffer
also. Consider the StringBuffer a linked list of characters.
I say this because the StringBuffer is resizable, while the String
class, and Java arrays are not. This means that the StringBuffer
cannot be implemented using an array. First you allocate 
the space necessary to implement a String containing 1024
characters. The memory used is slightly in excess of 2k bytes.
Next you must allocate 1024 characters and associate them with
the StringBuffer object. This is not explicit to the programmer,
because it is done by the methods in the StringBuffer class.
Finally you must allocate another String containing copies of 
each of those StringBuffer characters, another 2k bytes. If the
original String object is now unreferenced you must garbage
collect roughly 2k bytes. You must also garbage collect the
StringBuffer object and the 1024 elements of two byte characters.
The catch to this is that Java does not define what it means
by garbage collection. Some Java garbage collectors do not
defragment memory after collection. Heavy use of a StringBuffer
can result in highly fragmented memory. This may not be a memory
leak, but it can result in the eventual inability to allocate
a needed block of memory.

The StringBuffer is still highly inefficient compared to the 
ability to edit characters in place in a string. Such editing 
requires no memory allocation or deallocation. Neither does it 
require any gratuitous copying to convert from one type to another.
It certainly does not run the risk of fragmenting memory.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Stephen J. Bevan]

James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> Yes. The Stringbuffer class is much more efficient than the String
> class for editing purposes. It is still terribly inefficient 
> compared to, for instance, Ada strings.

Do you mean String or an Unbounded_String?  IMHO a Java StringBuffer
has very similar properties to an Ada Unbounded_String.  If you want
an equivalent of an Ada String, then the best approximation would be
char[] in Java.


> Remember the extra processing overhead needed to use a StringBuffer
> also. Consider the StringBuffer a linked list of characters.
> I say this because the StringBuffer is resizable, while the String
> class, and Java arrays are not. This means that the StringBuffer
> cannot be implemented using an array.

Actually it is implemented as an char[] -- at least in Sun's
implementation anyway.  If you turn a String into a StringBuffer then
it allocates an array large enough for the string plus some slop space
(16 characters).  If you append enough characters to fill the slop
space then a new array is created with a size 2* the current one and
all the characters are copied over.  This has bad worst-case
properties, especially for appending, but it seems to suffice on
average (I've certainly used it on quite a few occasions and it didn't
show up in profiling).  If you need something with better worst-case
properties then you can build it based on a char[].


> by garbage collection. Some Java garbage collectors do not
> defragment memory after collection. Heavy use of a StringBuffer
> can result in highly fragmented memory. This may not be a memory
> leak, but it can result in the eventual inability to allocate
> a needed block of memory.

Agreed, its a quality of implementation issue.  But then so is the
quality of the memory allocation routines you get with an Ada
implementation.  In both cases if you are not happy you can either
write your own pooling code or try a different implementation.


> The StringBuffer is still highly inefficient compared to the 
> ability to edit characters in place in a string.

I agree.  However, if you know you want to edit a String then the best
thing is to avoid making it a String in the first place and either
keep it as a char[] or wrapped in a StringBuffer.

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

The nice thing about Ada is that you can readily convert between the two
type and possibly utilize the Bounded_String type as a compromise. For most
of the things I do I use Unbounded_String because its fairly easy to move
them around, append things, etc. A lot of string manipulation doesn't
involve much editing, but does involve keeping track of length and/or moving
the data from place to place. Unbounded_String makes this very easy by not
having a static allocation & it is probably tolerably efficient for most
stuff. If you *do* need to do some sort of heavy editing & a static
allocation is more efficient, its pretty easy to hop into a subroutine that
allocates a static string of the right size, convert the Unbounded_String,
do the editing and go back. Of course, the necessity of doing this is
probably pretty rare (relative to the total amount of string handling code
that might exist in an app) and will be implementation dependent (some
compilers may be more efficient with it than others.) On the whole, its just
a matter of making the best use of the tools available & Ada certainly has a
lot of tools in this area.

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


"Stephen J. Bevan" <stephen_bevan@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:m31yns3s9v.fsf@yahoo.com...
> Do you mean String or an Unbounded_String?  IMHO a Java StringBuffer
> has very similar properties to an Ada Unbounded_String.  If you want
> an equivalent of an Ada String, then the best approximation would be
> char[] in Java.
>
>

Re: is ada dead?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <m34rso3ygq.fsf@yahoo.com>, stephen_bevan@yahoo.com (Stephen J. Bevan) writes:
> James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>> In other words, if
>> you want to loop through all the characters in an existing 1024
>> character String, replacing each one, you will require the creation
>> and garbage collection of 1024 1024 character strings. Since Java
>> characters are all 16 bits, this means that you need to chew up
>> over 2 Megabytes of data to edit a 1024 character String.
> 
> You could do it like that.  However, it would be more efficient to
> turn your String into a StringBuffer, which supports in-place updates.
> Make all the changes you want to the StringBuffer and then turn it
> back into a String.  This way you'd only chew up approximately 3K.

Programmers should not have to know the efficiency characteristics
of mechanisms underlying an implementation to that level of detail.

Re: is ada dead?

[Stephen J. Bevan]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> > You could do it like that.  However, it would be more efficient to
> > turn your String into a StringBuffer, which supports in-place updates.
> > Make all the changes you want to the StringBuffer and then turn it
> > back into a String.  This way you'd only chew up approximately 3K.
> 
> Programmers should not have to know the efficiency characteristics
> of mechanisms underlying an implementation to that level of detail.

I'm not sure what level of detail you are referring to here.  The
documentation for String hints quite strongly that you to use
StringBuffer if want to make changes to a String.

Knowing how StringBuffer is actually implemented IMHO is also
important since that is the difference between O(1) and O(n) for some
operations.  The same is true for Unbounded_String in Ada.

Re: is ada dead?

[Me]

My My My...

Does this mean that possibly programing languages have or will come
full circle?  

Or is this that the developers of new additons of each language
realize the benifits of Ada and want to be Ada wantabes??

No flaming intented , it just seems like a "I told you so " moment.
<smile>
Good Day all


On Sat, 07 Jul 2001 03:36:26 +0600, "Bobby D. Bryant"
<bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

>In article <9ff447f2.0107061757.34ca0723@posting.google.com>, "Adrian
>Hoe" <byhoe@greenlime.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Ada is a programming language appreciated by engineers who know the
>> benefits. Java is a programming language appreciated by people who
>> likes to read ads and listen to marketing persuasion.
>
>It looks to me that the family C, C++, Java, and C# show a teleological
>evolutionary trend toward becoming an Ada clone.
>
>Bobby Bryant
>Austin, Texas

GO REDS
GO STEELERS

Some Web sites I apprciate:

Get links to Tutorials on almost any programming language
http://www.programmingtutorials.com/main.asp

The largest programmer database on the net with over a million lines of code/articles/tutorials and thousands of open jobs!
http://www.planet-source-code.com/PlanetSourceCode/

The more people I meet, the more I love my computer.

Spelling and Grammar are forms of Art.
Is it any wonder why I HATE ART?????

BOYCOTT SPRINT:
               Any decision that is made with you,as a
               customer, is decided by a computer. We are
               humans and not electronic BITS of imformation.  

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Adrian Hoe,

It is good to hear from an Ada user in Malaysia.

It is unfortunate that Malaysian Universities see themselves as sources
of training for technology fads. The story you present below tells me
that UTM is interested only in encouraging payments from students and
industry. It has no real interest in making Malaysia a premier software
education and development center.

The education I can imagine from UTM can be described using an old
phrase American immigrants used to describe the Platte River over
150 years ago: It is a mile wide and an inch deep. Another common
description was "Too thick to drink and too thin to plow." The first
saying indicates that the river is not nearly as impressive as it
may first appear. The second saying indicates that it has no
practical use.

I am amazed that the senior lecturer was unchallenged in his or her
statement about Ada being too old. I expect this is in comparison to
Java. This amounts to saying that a proven product is not as good as
an unproven product because the unproven product is newer. Such a
statement is pure nonesense. 

It is even more nonesensical when you realize that Java has very
few new language developments. It is simply a compilation of a lot
of language features from a lot of other languages. In fact, without
the standard Java API the language would be completely ignored.
It offers nothing new, and it offers all these old features with
very poor performance. 

I would have been tempted to ask the senior lecturer if he or she
was willing to fly in an airplane with avionics programmed in 
Java. 

Look at Java's thread model. It is seriously flawed. This is not just
my opinion. This is the opinion of the Java development team
themselves. The earliest Java thread model included methods stop()
and suspend(). After several years of use it was discovered that
those methods are so unsafe that they had to be deprecated in the
language. The use of each method would frequently result in 
deadlocks and race conditions. The major problem was not that those
methods were faulty, but that the thread model was designed such 
that those methods could not be properly fixed. The only option
left to the Java design team was to simply declare those methods
to be broken, and advise against their use.

Java tried one somewhat new idea for dealing with threads. That is
the concept of thread groups. The idea was that threads could be
associated with a group, allowing all the threads in a group to
be stopped or suspended at the same time. Now that the stop()
and suspend() methods are deprecated, there is no reason to use
thread groups. Thus, the one attempt at real invention in the
Java language was made redundant because the underlying thread
model was so poorly designed. 

Java was originally touted as the answer to client-side programming
in a networked environment using applets. Applets are java
applications running in a user's browser. For several years people
tried to make applets work. Some success was achieved. Then Java 2
was released, with its Java Foundation Classes including the Swing
gui components. Swing is supposed to be usable with applets as
well as regular applications. Unfortunately, Netscape and Internet
Explorer have chosen to ignore Sun's advice on HTML support for
Swing applets. Each has chosen its own approach to supporting
Swing, resulting in a most horrible nightmare of HTML code to
merely start a Swing applet. Even worse, there is no assurance that
Netscape and Internet Explorer will not change their own HTML
syntax to support Swing. The result is that Swing is essentially
unusable in applets. Most companies simply use dynamically created
HTML and CGI to perform client-side programming. Microsoft has
created Application Server Pages for this purpose. Sun followed up
with Java Server Pages.

Applets are simply another feature of Java found to be of little
practical use.

Java is an unstandardized language. Sun likes to call this a
de-facto standard. Sun has its own meaning for such a phrase.
It means that everyone is encouraged to use Java. The Java API
documentation is freely published on the web (even though the
API documentation contains some serious errors). Sun is free to
change the API documentation at any time. The thread example
above is a good example. Sun maintains complete control over
what Java is and is not.

Sun has started into formal international standardization of Java
no less than five times. Each time they have pulled out of the 
effort. It is not clear to me that Sun will ever cooperate with
a standardization of Java. 

Java is clearly not superior to Ada. Java is not even clearly
newer than Ada. Java is clearly more unstable and unsafe to use
than Ada.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Andrzej Lewandowski]

"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:3B475678.C582735D@worldnet.att.net...
> Adrian Hoe,
>
> Java is clearly not superior to Ada. Java is not even clearly
> newer than Ada. Java is clearly more unstable and unsafe to use
> than Ada.
>

But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.

Who said this?... "garbage dumps are full of superior solutions". The process
of adapting programming language has very little technical component, it is
rather business and social process.

A.L.

Re: is ada dead?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <3b478165_3@news3.prserv.net>, "Andrzej Lewandowski" <lewandoREMOVE@attglobal.net> writes:
> 
> "James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:3B475678.C582735D@worldnet.att.net...
>> Adrian Hoe,
>>
>> Java is clearly not superior to Ada. Java is not even clearly
>> newer than Ada. Java is clearly more unstable and unsafe to use
>> than Ada.
>>
> 
> But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.

How many of those "everybody" is using Java outside the niche of
World Wide Web authoring ?  Many machines don't even support a
native Java compiler, just use of the Java bytecode engine.

Re: is ada dead?

[Florian Weimer]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:

> How many of those "everybody" is using Java outside the niche of
> World Wide Web authoring ?

I guess Java on the web is mostly dead (except for some niche
applications, of course).  None of the web sites I visit regularly
uses Java applets.  Even my bank got rid of Java in their online
services.  Nowadays, Flash animations are more common than Java
applets.

It seems as if Java is used mostly for ERP and such stuff nowadays, or
on web servers, and not on clients.

Re: is ada dead?

[Jeffrey Carter]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.
> 

Both parts of this conjunction are demonstrably false.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"You cheesy lot of second-hand electric donkey-bottom biters."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

RE: is ada dead?

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

From: Bob Leif
To: Jeffrey Carter et al.

One very expensive judgment, which includes negligence, against a software
vendor will suffice to make vendors conscious that they are legally required
to use the appropriate tools to create their products.

One of the major problems is that there appears to be a dearth of data on
the reliability of software and costs associated with the use of individual
programming languages. I believe I know about all of the Ada vs. C data,
which is minuscule compared to what should be available. The worst culprit
is the US DoD, who insists on good software practices (CMU levels), but who
evidently maintains no statistics on the use of software manufacturing
tools. Building an antiballistic missile is an extremely difficult
engineering job and may even be impractical. However, if DoD is going to
attempt it, a significant investment in Ada would be prudent.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Carter
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 6:46 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: is ada dead?


Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
>
> But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.
>

Both parts of this conjunction are demonstrably false.

--
Jeff Carter
"You cheesy lot of second-hand electric donkey-bottom biters."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

RE: is ada dead?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <mailman.994612811.16952.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> writes:

> One very expensive judgment, which includes negligence, against a software
> vendor will suffice to make vendors conscious that they are legally required
> to use the appropriate tools to create their products.

Typically using practices common in your industry is an adequate legal
defense in the US.

RE: is ada dead?

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

From: Bob Leif
To: Larry Kilgallen et al.

Larry Kilgallen wrote, "Typically using practices common in your industry is
an adequate legal
defense in the US."

This did not work for the tobacco industry. In an injury or death case, a
good (properly educated) malpractice lawyer will define the industry to have
required mission critical technology.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Larry Kilgallen
Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 2:29 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: RE: is ada dead?


In article <mailman.994612811.16952.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, "Robert C.
Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> writes:

> One very expensive judgment, which includes negligence, against a software
> vendor will suffice to make vendors conscious that they are legally
required
> to use the appropriate tools to create their products.

Typically using practices common in your industry is an adequate legal
defense in the US.

Mandating code quality (was: is Ada dead?)

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <mailman.994646829.26360.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> writes:
> From: Bob Leif
> To: Larry Kilgallen et al.
> 
> Larry Kilgallen wrote, "Typically using practices common in your industry is
> an adequate legal
> defense in the US."
> 
> This did not work for the tobacco industry. In an injury or death case, a
> good (properly educated) malpractice lawyer will define the industry to have
> required mission critical technology.

The tobacco industry lost only after _years_ of winning.  It is the
exception that proves the rule (the rule where I said "typically").

Re: is ada dead?

[Michal Nowak]

On 01-07-07, at 17:41, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote: 

>But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.

And who is using it? I don't. Maybe except applets on www pages.
And you think it is good? Java was intended to be more OO-language than
C++, to help desingning good software. It is step forward in some parts,
but I think it can cause bad habits. Many my friends write in Java - they
turned into "Java-people". But only little percent of them writes good
code. In many cases Java code bacame more messy than C++ code. ???
Yes, garbage collector made them lazy. "I put it here or there, never
mind, garbage collector will do its job". They gaining bad habits. Java
can be one-way ticket. Switching back to other languages can be difficult
(I observed this on labs - many of them had big problems in learning Ada
and trobles in understaning it.)

-Mike

------------------------
Mike Nowak
mailto: vinnie@inetia.pl

Re: is ada dead?

[Andrzej Lewandowski]

"Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote in message news:mailman.994589417.11908.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> On 01-07-07, at 17:41, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote:
>
> >But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.
>
> And who is using it? I don't.

Your problem, your choice.

> Maybe except applets on www pages.
> And you think it is good? Java was intended to be more OO-language than
> C++, to help desingning good software. It is step forward in some parts,
> but I think it can cause bad habits. Many my friends write in Java - they
> turned into "Java-people". But only little percent of them writes good
> code. In many cases Java code bacame more messy than C++ code. ???
> Yes, garbage collector made them lazy. "I put it here or there, never
> mind, garbage collector will do its job". They gaining bad habits. Java
> can be one-way ticket. Switching back to other languages can be difficult
> (I observed this on labs - many of them had big problems in learning Ada
> and trobles in understaning it.)

I was thinking the same way when I was in the Academia. Now I am working for
industry. My company has good programmers, good designers and they are
writing good Java code. All these are not oxymorons. Good programmer will
write good program in any language, bad programmer will write bad program in
any language. have you ever seem C program written in Ada? You can find
some excellent examples in some book published long ago by Springer. By
the way, we have commercial system for logistics management that sells
pretty well. It is all in Java, over 300 KLOC.

Yes, Java has its problems, threading model is one of them. I made an attempt
to use Ada (JGNAT strictly speaking) to write selected modules. Unfortunately, the
cost of support was prohibitive. I am ready to pay for support, but the cost must
be in sync with the rest of industry.

Java threading model can be easily fixed. I am using CSP model, strictly speaking
JCSP implementation from the University of Kent. Great!

Switching to new language is business decision. Such transition costs a lot and must be
carefully justified. I really cannot find arguments to switch to Ada. For what?... No
programmers, tools in 6 digit range, vendors with unknown financial
future. Moreover, except of programmers we have QA specialists, implementation services,
maintenance service, etc. All these people should know the language to some extent. How it
would cost to replace 50 people? Or to retrain them? And for what? To have "better"
language?

A.L>

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> Switching to new language is business decision. Such transition costs a lot and must be
> carefully justified. I really cannot find arguments to switch to Ada. For what?... No
> programmers, tools in 6 digit range, vendors with unknown financial
> future. Moreover, except of programmers we have QA specialists, implementation services,
> maintenance service, etc. All these people should know the language to some extent. How it
> would cost to replace 50 people? Or to retrain them? And for what? To have "better"
> language?
> 

This is all true. At some point someone decided to take the risk to
switch to Java. That decision must have incurred all the financial
and technical risks detailed above. Why was that risk justified when
switching to Ada is not?

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

That's rather presuming that all business decisions are made on some sort of
rational basis. Figure that languages develop constituencies - Java got a
stron constituency from a lot of C/C++ programmers who found it to have
advantages, but wasn't too far from what they were used to. They had some
help from the marketing guys who sold them on how "cool" it was. The poor
sap who manages the organization has grown far from being able to keep up
with technical innovations, etc., and has to trust his staff to tell him
what is the "right" decision WRT languages. His techno-dweebs say "Java is
the hip thing!" and he's got to believe them, so migration is made that way.

IMHO, if we want to sell Ada, it has to be from that grass-roots level. Get
the programers in the trenches using it in some capacity and deciding that
they like it & it will start to percolate up to the "business decision"
level. Key to that is having the kinds of development tools that are found
for C++, Java, et alia. If a development kit was bundled up and put on
bookshelves in Frye's or CompUSA, etc. that might go a long way to
increasing awareness in the right crowd.

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


"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3B490751.38523577@worldnet.att.net...
>
>
> This is all true. At some point someone decided to take the risk to
> switch to Java. That decision must have incurred all the financial
> and technical risks detailed above. Why was that risk justified when
> switching to Ada is not?

Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <9icg1p$kpi$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>what is the "right" decision WRT languages. His techno-dweebs say "Java is
>the hip thing!" and he's got to believe them, so migration is made that way.
>
>IMHO, if we want to sell Ada, it has to be from that grass-roots level. Get

I see two possible ways to increase Ada's "hipness". One would be a massive
marketing campaign, like Sun did for Java. I don't think anyone in the Ada
community has that kind of dough to throw around.

The other is to start developing lots of "cool" stuff with it. *That*, I think
we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
(http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
debuggers are cool. :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[Jerry Petrey]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <9icg1p$kpi$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
> >what is the "right" decision WRT languages. His techno-dweebs say "Java is
> >the hip thing!" and he's got to believe them, so migration is made that way.
> >
> >IMHO, if we want to sell Ada, it has to be from that grass-roots level. Get
> 
> I see two possible ways to increase Ada's "hipness". One would be a massive
> marketing campaign, like Sun did for Java. I don't think anyone in the Ada
> community has that kind of dough to throw around.
> 
> The other is to start developing lots of "cool" stuff with it. *That*, I think
> we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
> (http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
> debuggers are cool. :-)
> 
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com


You mean you need a debugger with Ada? :-)

Jerry
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4A13B0.11BAD466@west.raytheon.com>, Jerry Petrey <"jdpetrey
says...
>Ted Dennison wrote:
>> we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
>> (http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
>> debuggers are cool. :-)
>You mean you need a debugger with Ada? :-)

A better developer might not, but yes I do. My C, on the other hand, mostly
needs euthenasia. :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[Stefan Skoglund]

Jerry Petrey wrote:
> 
> You mean you need a debugger with Ada? :-)
> 

You need a debugger if you work with C or C++.
I debug c programs with gvd...

re: Why is ada dead?

[raj]

On Mon, 09 Jul 2001 15:54:57 GMT, Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>
wrote:
>The other is to start developing lots of "cool" stuff with it. *That*, I think
>we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
>(http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
>debuggers are cool. :-)

The Ada community ( like the lisp comunity: yes I do know about Paul
Graham's 49 million dollar sale to Yahoo ..) seem better at debating
the benefits of the language than actually writing commercially
visible software . 

Re: Why is ada dead?

[Stefan Skoglund]

raj wrote:
> The Ada community ( like the lisp comunity: yes I do know about Paul
> Graham's 49 million dollar sale to Yahoo ..) seem better at debating
> the benefits of the language than actually writing commercially
> visible software .

The Ada system houses should really do the Ada Airlines PR
gimmick !!

They should also do the Ada railway gimmick to...
hmm, not good railways is seen by americans as being obsolete...
hmm, no american would probably believe what the SNCF did
a few days ago... (a special run between Calais and Marseille)

Re: Why is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Stefan Skoglund wrote:
> 
> raj wrote:
> > The Ada community ( like the lisp comunity: yes I do know about Paul
> > Graham's 49 million dollar sale to Yahoo ..) seem better at debating
> > the benefits of the language than actually writing commercially
> > visible software .
> 
> The Ada system houses should really do the Ada Airlines PR
> gimmick !!
> 
> They should also do the Ada railway gimmick to...
> hmm, not good railways is seen by americans as being obsolete...
> hmm, no american would probably believe what the SNCF did
> a few days ago... (a special run between Calais and Marseille)

Oh, you mean the trip did not take three days, with frequent stops
to allow freight the right of way, and to allow maintenance crews
to repair 100 year old rails?

Nope. No American would believe that. 

American railroads currently carry more traffic than ever before in
their history. The plain truth, however, is that only a tiny fraction
of that traffic is passenger. Almost all is freight.

Here in Colorado Springs, the rails are busy day and night with
freight traffic. The largest fraction of that is trains carrying
coal. Every day there are several trains of over two kilometers
length carrying nothing but coal from the coal mines of
Wyoming and Idaho.

Of course, we do have one little passenger train in our area.
That would be the train that travels to the top of Pike's Peak.
The equipment for that train was purchased from Switzerland
a long time ago. The track is steep enough to require a cog
rail system. The train route rises 8000 feet (2.4 Km) in about 
12 miles (19.3 km) to a final altitude of 14110 feet (4.3 Km).
This is far too steep for normal trains.

Some of that coal stops in Colorado Springs. We generate our
electricity from burning coal. We also provide all the power our
city needs from local power plants. We do this with negligable
air polution. Recently the American Lung Association declared that
Colorado Springs has the third cleanest air of all American
cities. As an example, on an average day I can clearly see 
mountains over 70 miles away. That is not bad for average air
quality. On a good day I can see mountains over 200 miles
away. Today I can only see about 70 miles, but we are currently
having thunderstorms.

I will be surprised if the US ever develops a train that can 
compete with the French TGV. In the West the population is too
sparse to support the cost. In the East the cost of acquiring the
right of way would be too expensive. Current rail lines could not
be converted because they contain too many sharp turns to support
high speed rail travel. 

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: Why is ada dead?

[Stefan Skoglund]

James Rogers wrote:
> I will be surprised if the US ever develops a train that can
> compete with the French TGV. In the West the population is too
> sparse to support the cost. In the East the cost of acquiring the
> right of way would be too expensive. Current rail lines could not
> be converted because they contain too many sharp turns to support
> high speed rail travel.

Ok i will numerate the areas of the US which i think has
potential:
Illinois (Chicago-St Louis, Chicago-Mpls, Chicago-Detroit)
Washingto-Boston (fixing a number of nasty curves along the corridor)
NorthWest (portland-vancouver)
Florida
California

The Acela train could be competitive in the East and also
California. And then we have the tilting TGV version.

The North-East corridor can be improved by eliminating a number
of nasty curves but it would mean investing maybe 1 bn dollar
while fighting the nimby's.

The problem is getting people onboard in sufficient numbers
and also US citites is usually much more decentralized than european
ones and they also usually has a much worser commuting system
(LA is prob the worst one)
Chicago is bad too due to the rapid expansion west into Illinois
farmlands.

Colorado could be interesting too.
Col Springs-Denver

A worse problem is US railways disbelief in electrification but
they have part-good reasons to dislike it.

Trains in the US (was: Why is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B50D2EC.9B294D87@worldnet.att.net>, James Rogers says...
>Oh, you mean the trip did not take three days, with frequent stops
>to allow freight the right of way, and to allow maintenance crews
>to repair 100 year old rails?

Ohhh. Don't forget a 5 hour stop 2 miles from the destination while the railroad
sends out 2 more engineers because the current set has just exceeded their
union-set maximum work time. :-)

>I will be surprised if the US ever develops a train that can 
>compete with the French TGV. In the West the population is too
>sparse to support the cost. In the East the cost of acquiring the
>right of way would be too expensive. Current rail lines could not
>be converted because they contain too many sharp turns to support
>high speed rail travel. 

Amtrak does have a relatively new high-speed service running between Boston and
Washington. In this case, "high-speed" means 150mph tops, and the older ones
already were doing 125. I think the TGV goes about 250. But it is a start. 

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Why is ada dead?

[raj]

On Mon, 9 Jul 2001 10:45:12 -0400, "Marin David Condic"
<marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:

>That's rather presuming that all business decisions are made on some sort of
>rational basis. Figure that languages develop constituencies - Java got a
>stron constituency from a lot of C/C++ programmers who found it to have
>advantages, but wasn't too far from what they were used to. They had some
>help from the marketing guys who sold them on how "cool" it was. The poor
>sap who manages the organization has grown far from being able to keep up
>with technical innovations, etc., and has to trust his staff to tell him
>what is the "right" decision WRT languages. His techno-dweebs say "Java is
>the hip thing!" and he's got to believe them, so migration is made that way.


I am now hearing of increasing numbers of programmers  who will only
take on jobs if they involve Java and JSP !
Their rationale is that they do not want to lose their skill set by
working in languages that are not commercially hot.

Re: Why is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

raj wrote:
> 
> I am now hearing of increasing numbers of programmers  who will only
> take on jobs if they involve Java and JSP !
> Their rationale is that they do not want to lose their skill set by
> working in languages that are not commercially hot.

Where will those programmers be when the next hot technology comes
along? What is wrong with the money available from languages that are
not at the top of the technology fad list? 

People who react to any kind of fad like this are riding the tip of
the whip. They are completely at the mercy of the decisions of other
unthinking people. They feel safe because they are surrounded by
lots of other lemmings. That does not actually make them safe when
the lemming heard starts hurtling over the cliff. 

I have always believed I was responsible for my own career. I am also
responsible for finding work that satisfies me. I cannot achieve any
level of control over my work if I do not actively choose the kind of
work I do, and the tools I use.

The mindset eager to follow fads is, IMHO, an indication of a very
insecure personality. Fad followers are continually looking for the
affirmation of others to improve their own self image. The continuing
search for the next fad is chaotic. It engenders psychotic reactions
against reason, stabiity, and even custom. In summary, it is a 
strong force against civilization and culture. It is an attempt to
find security in the ephemeral, stability in chaos, and satisfaction
in mindless action.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Michal Nowak]

>> >But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.
>>
>> And who is using it? I don't.
>
>Your problem, your choice.

Why problem? This is still no-only-Java world. I may choose among other
software.

>industry. My company has good programmers, good designers and they are
>writing good Java code.

Congratulations! I wish you best and only good programmers.

>Good programmer will
>write good program in any language, bad programmer will write bad program in
>any language.

I agree. I did not say, that if you write in Ada you always do good programs,
and if you write in non-Ada you write bad programs. I want to say, that Ada
has some great features, that help programmer in his/her work.
Features which Java/C++ doesn't have.

>Switching to new language is business decision.
>And for what? To have "better" language?

What you mean by switching? Resing from one language and start all in new one?
Here you are right. But I think about doing things concurrently. Maybe start
from little project in other language (maybe Ada :)), if needed.
I don't want to force you to change Java to Ada because this or that. If your
company is doing well in Java, do it in Java. But there is a lot of projects,
where it is better to write in Ada, and a lot of people, who like to write in Ada.

-Mike

------------------------
Mike Nowak
mailto: vinnie@inetia.pl

Re: is ada dead?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:

> Yes, Java has its problems, threading model is one of them. I made an attempt
> to use Ada (JGNAT strictly speaking) to write selected modules. Unfortunately, the
> cost of support was prohibitive. I am ready to pay for support, but the cost must
> be in sync with the rest of industry.

This is a long-standing issue with Ada.   When the language was mandated by the
DoD, lots of compiler publishers rushed to the trough, eager to feed on government
pork.   Because they thought they had the DoD as a captive customer, they charged
exorbitant prices for their compiler and tool products.   One could make the case that
it was the compiler publishers, particularly some of the most prominent of them, who
were most culpable in the failure of Ada to ride the wave of democratization of
programming that emerged during the 1980's.

A few compiler publishers tried to break that pattern, among them RR Software and
Meridian.   Alsys never did get it.    Rational never got it.    Aonix, the child of
Alsys, finally caught on, but possibly too late.    Currently, the salvation of Ada
seems to lie in the availability of GNAT products and the associated FSF movement.
Still, support is expensive, regardless of where you seek it.   I think the surviving
compiler publishers are doing a better job of recognizing the need for pricing their
products and services more orthogonally to the marketplace, but we still have a
long way to go.

The question that triggered this thread has to do with the viability of Ada.   Recently,
I have encountered academics who believe there is no point in teaching Ada anymore
since it is, if not dead, irrelevant.   One even told me it would be impossible to buy
an Ada compiler in five years.    Wrongheaded as that opinion may be, it is more
widespread than I would like.    One of my students works for a large defense
contractor with products written in Ada.    He tells me his job is to "rip out all of
that Ada code and replace it with C++."   As stupid as that decision might be, it is
a reality we must acknowledge.

We also have to do a better job of countering minsinformation.   Among the idiotic
things I have heard recently.   "Boeing is going to convert the B777 avionics code
to C++."   "The FAA has abandoned Ada.  It no longer plans to do any new development
in Ada."   "The transition to Ada 95 is too expensive.  We plan to convert our code
to C++."    "There are no development tools for Ada.  We are going to use C++ and
Java."    Oh, and this one is still around.  "Ada is too expensive.  The cost/benefit of
Ada is not offset by Ada's being a better language.   We can build software just as
well and for less money than it would cost to use Ada."

While I believe that all those statements are dead wrong,  some people at major defense
contractors making software tool decisions, or who influence those decisions, actually
believe this stuff.  Yes, it is true that some of them are making the decision without
understanding the real issues related to the brittleness of C++, but that does not change
the fact they are making the decision.   The only heartening thing is that, once they
understand just how horrid C++ is, some have revisited that decision and have given
consideration to the benefits of Ada.   Perhaps they must come to a realization that
the grass really isn't greener after all.   Perhaps, once they are really knowledgeable
about the issues of C++ versus Ada they will overcome their own biases and make
the right choice.   Perhaps pigs will grow wings and fly.

Ada is not dead.  We have clients who are committed to it and continue to recognize
its benefits.   ACT, DDC-I, ICC, Aonix, RR Software, OCS, and Rational, continue
to get contracts for new Ada projects from new clients who understand Ada.   Those
of us with a commercial interest in the success of Ada have a responsibility to ensure
that those projects are successful, that they are economically on sound footing, and
that the customer is not left out to dry on important issues such as tools (debuggers, etc.),
support, and training.   If we continue to provide quality, Ada can survive, revive, and
grow into a viable alternative to the junk that has become so prevalent in the popular
software development industry.

Richard Riehle

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

One of the things that would go a long way to countering the misinformation
and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price. Part
of the problem is visibility and part of the problem is the (IMHO, very
sound) argument that by picking C++ or Java or some other language, a
businessman can leverage all the stuff that comes with its toolkit (GUI
builders, debuggers, library tools, class libraries, etc.) to get to market
quicker than can be done with Ada.

Ada has historically concentrated on reducing lifecycle costs, which is a
real advantage. However, a very large chunk of the market doesn't care about
the lifecycle. They care about time to market. Right or wrong, that's what
people are buying. Ada has to sell that or it will remain "irrelavent" in
terms of the bulk market.

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


"Lao Xiao Hai" <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:3B51DD8A.9FBCA84F@ix.netcom.com...
>
>
> We also have to do a better job of countering minsinformation.   Among the
idiotic
> things I have heard recently.   "Boeing is going to convert the B777
avionics code
> to C++."   "The FAA has abandoned Ada.  It no longer plans to do any new
development
> in Ada."   "The transition to Ada 95 is too expensive.  We plan to convert
our code
> to C++."    "There are no development tools for Ada.  We are going to use
C++ and
> Java."    Oh, and this one is still around.  "Ada is too expensive.  The
cost/benefit of
> Ada is not offset by Ada's being a better language.   We can build
software just as
> well and for less money than it would cost to use Ada."
>

Re: is ada dead?

[Mark Lundquist]

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
message news:9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
misinformation
> and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.

I agree.

I've always been impressed with what Borland did with Delphi -- how they
avoided the "P-word" :-) and created the brand independent of the language.
Rather than focus attention on the language at a time when Pascal was no
longer fashionable, it draws attention to the value added by the Delphi
environment, tools and libraries.  So Delphi developers actually do think of
themselves as "developing in Delphi" not "in Object Pascal".

Would that work today for Ada?  Who knows... but I'm intrigued... :-)

> Part
> of the problem is visibility and part of the problem is the (IMHO, very
> sound) argument that by picking C++ or Java or some other language, a
> businessman can leverage all the stuff that comes with its toolkit (GUI
> builders, debuggers, library tools, class libraries, etc.) to get to
market
> quicker than can be done with Ada.
>
> Ada has historically concentrated on reducing lifecycle costs, which is a
> real advantage. However, a very large chunk of the market doesn't care
about
> the lifecycle. They care about time to market. Right or wrong, that's what
> people are buying

Lead-time considerations will tend to dominate over lifecycle considerations
under certain conditions, such as (off the top of my head):
        * In a new technology, where time to market translates into lead
time ("first-mover advantage");
        * In markets where the pace of change and/or innovation is high
enough that product life-expectancy is short (everything becomes obsolete in
a short time).
        * When you're not doing any reuse.

It also dominates if the market is full of thinkalike lemmings :-) who take
up the mantra of "time to market" uncritically.  It's too easy to believe
that "time to market is everything" when everybody else is saying that
too... in our business culture, nobody ever gets blamed for running with the
crowd, so if you never take the time to stop and ask, "Do we want to make
stuff that will be obsolete in a year?  Do we really have to?  What would
happen if we didn't?  What would it require to do it differently"?
One problem is that the success stories naturally get the attention, and it
turns out that most of them had first-mover advantage.  But what about the
flops?  How many of them had this advantage and flopped anyway?  We'll never
know because nobody is interested in the flops!  So first-mover advantage is
seen almost as sufficient for success, when maybe it is only necessary, and
in the long run maybe not even that.

But I think the opportunity for Ada is to position itself as the technology
that is most effective over the lifecycle, and that not at the cost of
lead-time!  For this, we need all the things you mentioned in your post...

-- Mark

Re: is ada dead?

[tmoran]

>   * In a new technology, where time to market translates into lead
> time ("first-mover advantage");
  "First-mover advantage" is more perception than reality.  Lots of
introducer companies have wilted, while the follower that "does it up
right" blooms.  Univac-IBM, Visicalc-Lotus, Macintosh-Windows,
Netscape-Microsoft etc
  One thing dragging down software first-movers is that they tend all
too soon to have a buggy, un-maintainable, un-extendable, pile of hacks,
while the second-mover can see what features the market has asked
for and can actually design a clean system to supply them.

"first-mover (dis)advantage" (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Mark Lundquist]

<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message
news:wKJ47.216277$%i7.123588763@news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com...
> >   * In a new technology, where time to market translates into lead
> > time ("first-mover advantage");
>   "First-mover advantage" is more perception than reality.

I'd agree that it's not as big of a deal as is made of it (as you saw from
the rest of my post... :-)

Conventional wisdom in the "New Economy" was that if you had to choose
between aiming and shooting first, it was better to shoot first.  This
mentality might have had something to do with so many companies' inability
to deliver value commensurate with their market valuations :-)

On the side... I read somewhere (so it must be true... :-) that in the Old
West, the gunslingers who survived the longest were not necessarily the ones
who were quickest on the draw, but rather the ones who took the time to aim
their shot :-)

> Lots of
> introducer companies have wilted, while the follower that "does it up
> right" blooms.  Univac-IBM, Visicalc-Lotus, Macintosh-Windows,
> Netscape-Microsoft etc
>   One thing dragging down software first-movers is that they tend all
> too soon to have a buggy, un-maintainable, un-extendable, pile of hacks,
> while the second-mover can see what features the market has asked
> for and can actually design a clean system to supply them.

Not only do they get a better perspective on the market, as you point out...
they also avoid the pressure of the "rush to market" mentality on
development schedules, so that the developers are more likely to produce
something better than an "un-*-able pile of hacks" :-)

-- mark

Re: "first-mover (dis)advantage" (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <AeY97.12138$Ke4.8610444@news1.sttln1.wa.home.com>, Mark Lundquist
says...
>Conventional wisdom in the "New Economy" was that if you had to choose
>between aiming and shooting first, it was better to shoot first.  This
>mentality might have had something to do with so many companies' inability
>to deliver value commensurate with their market valuations :-)

It probably mostly had to do with the fact that the real goal was just securing
large amounts of VC funding. I'd imagine that it'd be easier to get funding if
you are the first company to have/announce/think of a product for the mythical
market that you just made up. :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[Bertrand Augereau]

> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
> message news:9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> > One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
> misinformation
> > and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> > inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> > environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.
>
> I agree.
>
> I've always been impressed with what Borland did with Delphi -- how they
> avoided the "P-word" :-) and created the brand independent of the
language.
> Rather than focus attention on the language at a time when Pascal was no
> longer fashionable, it draws attention to the value added by the Delphi
> environment, tools and libraries.  So Delphi developers actually do think
of
> themselves as "developing in Delphi" not "in Object Pascal".
>
> Would that work today for Ada?  Who knows... but I'm intrigued... :-)

Ever used Oracle PL/SQL?

Re: is ada dead?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> One of the things that would go a long way to countering the misinformation
> and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.

But there is not one C compiler, there are many.

That brings up another problem Ada faces, a lack of competition.
Advocates are happy just to get one compiler for an environment,
but there is never the competition that gets one vendor trying to
outdo the other in features desired by the customer base.

I believe that is also a shortcoming of Freeware, GPL, etc.
Supporters are inclined to rally around the (single) flag
than try to do something with broader appeal to the public.

Re: is ada dead?

[Marin David Condic]

Note that I did use the plural - "C++ environmentSSSSSS" :-)

As for competition - if there is a significant market there, competitors
will get into the game. The problem right now is that Ada has such a
(relatively) small share of the market, that nobody wants to go fighting
over the scraps. I'd bet that if some vendor offered an Ada kit that started
to sell over a million copies, you'd see Bill Gates "embracing and
extending" it real fast. Right now though, the Ada vendors are maybe
managing to make a living, but nobody wants to compete in a market like
that - they want to go for "The Big Score".

Maybe this is why we Ada-philes feel lucky to have even one vendor around
supporting our favorite platform. If our ranks grew, we'd have more leverage
and could start demanding more.

As for the GPL thing - I think we could fix that real fast if we actually
got the ADCL concept off the ground. We'd probably find *LOTS* of developers
who would gladly put their code out for freely available access if they
thought there was a chance that down the road somewhere, they might make a
buck off of it. Right now with the GPL, you basically get nothing for your
contribution, except possibly the ability to earn a buck as a consultant on
something you are intimately familiar with because you wrote it and the nice
warm fuzzy feeling you get watching Red Hat clean up by selling the code you
wrote.

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

"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:2$l9ZPZiDd4x@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic"
<marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> > One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
misinformation
> > and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> > inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> > environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.
>
> But there is not one C compiler, there are many.
>
> That brings up another problem Ada faces, a lack of competition.
> Advocates are happy just to get one compiler for an environment,
> but there is never the competition that gets one vendor trying to
> outdo the other in features desired by the customer base.
>
> I believe that is also a shortcoming of Freeware, GPL, etc.
> Supporters are inclined to rally around the (single) flag
> than try to do something with broader appeal to the public.

Re: is ada dead?

[Gary Scott]

Hi, several of the Fortran 95 vendors include multiple compilers within
their distribution.  So you get a Fortran 77, Fortran 95, and a C++
compiler all for the price of one, all interoperable, all using the same
IDE.  Would that help?

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Note that I did use the plural - "C++ environmentSSSSSS" :-)
> 
> As for competition - if there is a significant market there, competitors
> will get into the game. The problem right now is that Ada has such a
> (relatively) small share of the market, that nobody wants to go fighting
> over the scraps. I'd bet that if some vendor offered an Ada kit that started
> to sell over a million copies, you'd see Bill Gates "embracing and
> extending" it real fast. Right now though, the Ada vendors are maybe
> managing to make a living, but nobody wants to compete in a market like
> that - they want to go for "The Big Score".
> 
> Maybe this is why we Ada-philes feel lucky to have even one vendor around
> supporting our favorite platform. If our ranks grew, we'd have more leverage
> and could start demanding more.
> 
> As for the GPL thing - I think we could fix that real fast if we actually
> got the ADCL concept off the ground. We'd probably find *LOTS* of developers
> who would gladly put their code out for freely available access if they
> thought there was a chance that down the road somewhere, they might make a
> buck off of it. Right now with the GPL, you basically get nothing for your
> contribution, except possibly the ability to earn a buck as a consultant on
> something you are intimately familiar with because you wrote it and the nice
> warm fuzzy feeling you get watching Red Hat clean up by selling the code you
> wrote.
> 
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> 
> "Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
> news:2$l9ZPZiDd4x@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> > In article <9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic"
> <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> > > One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
> misinformation
> > > and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> > > inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> > > environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.
> >
> > But there is not one C compiler, there are many.
> >
> > That brings up another problem Ada faces, a lack of competition.
> > Advocates are happy just to get one compiler for an environment,
> > but there is never the competition that gets one vendor trying to
> > outdo the other in features desired by the customer base.
> >
> > I believe that is also a shortcoming of Freeware, GPL, etc.
> > Supporters are inclined to rally around the (single) flag
> > than try to do something with broader appeal to the public.

Re: is ada dead?

[Mark Lundquist]

"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:2$l9ZPZiDd4x@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic"
<marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> > One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
misinformation
> > and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> > inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> > environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.
>
> But there is not one C compiler, there are many.
>
> That brings up another problem Ada faces, a lack of competition.

Hmmm....

Exclude for the time being the niche players in the C market, e.g. compilers
targeting microcontrollers, vectorizing compilers etc...

For the broad market, virtually every C compiler supplier is a platform
vendor.

So while there are many C compilers, there are no C compiler companies.  So
do these compilers really compete against each other?  How many platform
adoption decisions are driven by competetive factors relating to C
compilers?  None!  And I'll bet that even extends to IDE factors, e.g. when
Windows is chosen over Unix or MacOS, Visual Studio is *not* part of the
reason (even if VS is really great -- I'm not saying this is because it's
bad).

So I would argue that if lack of competition is an issue, comparisons with
the C market don't illustrate it...

Also, someday there really may be just one C compiler! :-)  It's possible
that the platform vendors will all switch to gcc as their "next generation"
compilers.  (Of course this is subject to the broader question of whether
the platform builders will move future OS investment to Linux, since ISV
support for 3rd-tier OS's has dried up.  A platform vendor cannot survive
without an application base).

> Advocates are happy just to get one compiler for an environment,
> but there is never the competition that gets one vendor trying to
> outdo the other in features desired by the customer base.
>

No, but if there were a single Ada supplier, if they were giving me what I
want I'd be happy whether or not they were motivated to outdo another Ada
vendor...  Of course the motivation has to come from competition against
something, and in this case that something is all the other languages!  That
is, even a single supplier has to be responsive to the market, unless it is
a captive market.  A single Ada vendor will die if they blow off their
customers/prospects, just as surely as will a vendor operating in a more
obviously "competetive" market.  If they don't want to die, they'll continue
to be innovative and responsive.

> I believe that is also a shortcoming of Freeware, GPL, etc.
> Supporters are inclined to rally around the (single) flag
> than try to do something with broader appeal to the public.

I'd argue that that in the open source space, incremental improvements are
rightly seen to be more cost-effective as subjects of "incorporation" rather
than "differentiation".

-- Mark

Re: is ada dead?

[Michal Nowak]

On 01-07-15, at 11:14, Lao Xiao Hai  wrote:

>The question that triggered this thread has to do with the viability of Ada.   Recently,
>I have encountered academics who believe there is no point in teaching Ada anymore
>since it is, if not dead, irrelevant.   One even told me it would be impossible to buy
>an Ada compiler in five years.    Wrongheaded as that opinion may be, it is more
>widespread than I would like.    One of my students works for a large defense
>contractor with products written in Ada.    He tells me his job is to "rip out all of
>that Ada code and replace it with C++."   As stupid as that decision might be, it is
>a reality we must acknowledge.
>
>We also have to do a better job of countering minsinformation.   Among the idiotic
>things I have heard recently.   "Boeing is going to convert the B777 avionics code
>to C++."   "The FAA has abandoned Ada.  It no longer plans to do any new development
>in Ada."   "The transition to Ada 95 is too expensive.  We plan to convert our code
>to C++."    "There are no development tools for Ada.  We are going to use C++ and
>Java."    Oh, and this one is still around.  "Ada is too expensive.  The cost/benefit of
>Ada is not offset by Ada's being a better language.   We can build software just as
>well and for less money than it would cost to use Ada."

...Sounds bad, very bad. I got mixed feeling. Some letters were so optimistic, this
one makes opposite thoughts.
Dark vision of future? One-language tendency world? Java - queen, C++/C# - king?
Is this direction the world is heading for?
News like this one can clip you wings. I don't want it became true. And if I say I know
Ada, during applying for a job, I don't want to get response: "Sorry, we need Java
programmers, whole world writes in Java, we must follow the trend".
I see this tendedency in my country, and it arises.
I still hope there is better world outside...

-Mike


------------------------
Mike Nowak
mailto: vinnie@inetia.pl

Re: is ada dead?

[raj]

>But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.

One result of this is that managers say:
" But if we use Ada were are we going to get new programmers"
Considering that the turnover in the industry is around 60 % per year
this may not be an unreasonable argument. There are plenty of Java ,
and C++ and Perl programmers. Ada programmers are as rare as lisp
prgrammers.

In addition, most Ada programmers I have come across are elderly 
(ie: over 40 ) and we all know that the average manager prefers hiring
a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's. 
( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
for their families ...)

Re: is ada dead?

[raj]

>Who said this?... "garbage dumps are full of superior solutions". The process
>of adapting programming language has very little technical component, it is
>rather business and social process.

True.
Just look at the marginalisation of Lisp , Smalltalk and ML.

"garbage dumps are full of superior solutions"

[raj]

>Who said this?... "garbage dumps are full of superior solutions". The process
>of adapting programming language has very little technical component, it is
>rather business and social process.

True.
Just look at the marginalisation of Lisp , Smalltalk and ML.

Managers believe that Ada programmers are hard to find

[raj]

>But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.

One result of this is that managers say:
" But if we use Ada were are we going to get new programmers"
Considering that the turnover in the industry is around 60 % per year
this may not be an unreasonable argument. There are plenty of Java ,
and C++ and Perl programmers. Ada programmers are as rare as lisp
prgrammers.

In addition, most Ada programmers I have come across are elderly 
(ie: over 40 ) and we all know that the average manager prefers hiring
a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's. 
( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
for their families ...)

Re: Managers believe that Ada programmers are hard to find

[Martin Dowie]

I'm not over 40 nor (to my knowledge) are any of the other engineers
at this site with Ada experience!

raj <israelrt@optushome.com.au> wrote in message
news:c15nktcvle0s7vhh92f3n0ki9bbjvuct34@4ax.com...
> >But almost everybody is using Java and almost non\body is using Ada.
>
> One result of this is that managers say:
> " But if we use Ada were are we going to get new programmers"
> Considering that the turnover in the industry is around 60 % per year
> this may not be an unreasonable argument. There are plenty of Java ,
> and C++ and Perl programmers. Ada programmers are as rare as lisp
> prgrammers.
>
> In addition, most Ada programmers I have come across are elderly
> (ie: over 40 ) and we all know that the average manager prefers hiring
> a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's.
> ( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
> for their families ...)

Re: Managers believe that Ada programmers are hard to find

[Marc A. Criley]

raj wrote:
> 
> In addition, most Ada programmers I have come across are elderly
> (ie: over 40 ) and we all know that the average manager prefers hiring
> a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's.
> ( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
> for their families ...)

Hey Raj, when you're 39 1/2, 40 isn't going to look so "elderly" anymore
:-)

"Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill."

Marc A. Criley

Re: Managers believe that Ada programmers are hard to find

[Jeffrey Carter]

raj wrote:
> 
> ... the average manager prefers hiring
> a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's.
> ( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
> for their families ...)

If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys.

-- 
Jeffrey Carter

Re: Managers believe that Ada programmers are hard to find

[Pat Rogers]

"Jeffrey Carter" <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com> wrote in message
news:3B4C8D99.41DF9732@boeing.com...
> raj wrote:
> >
> > ... the average manager prefers hiring
> > a programmer in his/her late 20's to early 30's.
> > ( Among other advantages they can be paid less and take less time off
> > for their families ...)
>
> If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys.

Indeed.

For "programmer" above, I propose a change to "coder".

Re: is ada dead?

[Andrzej Lewandowski]

"Adrian Hoe" <byhoe@greenlime.com> wrote in message news:9ff447f2.0107061757.34ca0723@posting.google.com...
> Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message news:<3B460DA9.C2965042@ix.netcom.com>...
 > Ada is dead in Malaysia. One of UTM's (University of Technology
> Malaysia) KL campus was teaching and promoting Ada with a lot of
> confidence couple years ago when they were a joint-venture with
> Thomson CSF. Recently, I found that they had deserted Ada and switch
> to Java for the reason that there is no Ada market in Malaysia.
> ANother reason came from one of the senior lecturer was that Ada was
> too old. I told the senior lecturer I could not believe what he was
> saying because they were so confident about Ada.
[....]
> In universities (Malaysian, Ok?), programming languages are taught not
> because of teching the students of programming concepts, but for the
> sake of market requirement. That's the most pathetic and irresponsible
> decision.

You are in a good society. I was once teaching Real Time Programming and was
using Ada. This was at not that bad U.S. University. Once, after the end of semester
students brought to the Dean collection of Classified from local newspapers and
asked him to find at least one job as that would require Ada. Dean was smart enough
to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.

This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job market for Ada
programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say, C++, Java, VB or COBOL.
Students invest quite substantial amount of money to get a degree, and yes, they
expect that this investment will bring some return. Generally, there is little room
to study for "scientific pleasure". They are studying to get skills that will position
them well on the job market. They will not learn Ada just this is a "better language".
They will study the language that is visible on the market.

What regards using Ada in the industry: nothing will change if the average cost
of SUPPORTED Ada tools is in high 5 digit range. Yes, Ada is better than, say,
Java, at least for some tasks, but I cannot justify the cost just to have a pleasure
of working with "better language". Nothing will change if Ada vendors don't drop
one zero from their price list.

A.L.

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> You are in a good society. I was once teaching Real Time Programming and was
> using Ada. This was at not that bad U.S. University. Once, after the end of semester
> students brought to the Dean collection of Classified from local newspapers and
> asked him to find at least one job as that would require Ada. Dean was smart enough
> to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
> smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.

Do you really believe that a student graduating from an American
University with a CS degree and no professional experience is ready to 
be employed as a software engineer? I do not. Many companies I have
worked for do not. The one company most willing to hire new graduates
insisted that the new graduates could not be considered software
engineers until completing one year on the job, and that year was
spent under the close supervision of an experienced software engineer.
If, at any time, the new graduate did not appear to be progressing
properly, he or she could be terminated with no excuse or warning.

Other companies I have worked for are less enthusiastic about hiring
new graduates. They typically want three to five years experience
on an applicant's resume or cv before even considering that job
applicant.

> This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job market for Ada
> programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say, C++, Java, VB or COBOL.
> Students invest quite substantial amount of money to get a degree, and yes, they
> expect that this investment will bring some return. Generally, there is little room
> to study for "scientific pleasure". They are studying to get skills that will position
> them well on the job market. They will not learn Ada just this is a "better language".
> They will study the language that is visible on the market.

They study the language most visible in the job postings. That, of
course does not mean that those students will graduate with even a
shadow of the experience needed to perform the positions offered.
If those students look more closely they will see that the positions
advertised all, or mostly all, contain experience requirements.

Studying a language does not help. My experience is that companies
that do hire new graduates expect them to have some understanding of
the basic concepts of software development. They also expect to need
to train those new graduates in the processes, tools, and product
domains concerning the hiring company. This often includes training
the new graduate in the language used by the company. This training
takes about the same amount of time and effort whether or not the
graduate "learned" the language in the University classroom.

The theory used by the students is that University training and
experience really counts. In reality it does not. It is easy for
a university to support this fantasy by chasing the current
software language fad. The university can avoid a lot of meetings
with upset students. Back in the early days of civilization, when I
went through a University education, I was fed a diet of concepts
such as academic freedom, intellectual integrity, and the need for
a deep and broad education. It appears that many universities have
given up on those ideals. Instead, they have become that which they
used to despise. They have become institutions that produce 
people with narrow, and largely useless, educations, instead of
well and broadly educated people ready to build and lead their
civilizations and cultures.

> What regards using Ada in the industry: nothing will change if the average cost
> of SUPPORTED Ada tools is in high 5 digit range. Yes, Ada is better than, say,
> Java, at least for some tasks, but I cannot justify the cost just to have a pleasure
> of working with "better language". Nothing will change if Ada vendors don't drop
> one zero from their price list.

This is now, and always has been, a vacuous argument.

Look at the cost of a professional C development environment.
You need a C compiler.
You need an editor.
You need a build tool such as the Unix make program.
You need a debugger.
You need a syntax checking tool such as lint.
You need a configuration management tool.
You need a run-time profiling tool, to identify little errors
such as memory leaks and array bounds violations.

What do you need for an Ada development environment?

You need an Ada compiler (which contains a very good syntax checker,
  an editing system, and often a configuration management system).
You may need a debugger.

The cost of a C language development system often exceeds the cost
of an Ada development system. 

The real problem is that most companies have no idea how much their
software costs. Most companies have very weak software processes with
few or no meaningful software metrics. That is why most company's
software processes evaluate to CMM level 1. That is why a large
percentage of software development projects in the commercial world
are cancelled before their release date, even after the
expenditure of the equivalent of greater than 10**6 Dollars.

Companies with proper software development processes understand that
tool costs are irrelevant. Project and product failures are the real
expense.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Jeffrey Carter]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote [about a university deciding to change from
Ada to C for teaching]:
> 
> This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic.

This statement is false.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"You cheesy lot of second-hand electric donkey-bottom biters."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

Re: is ada dead?

[Pascal Obry]

"Andrzej Lewandowski" <lewandoREMOVE@attglobal.net> writes:

> You are in a good society. I was once teaching Real Time Programming and was
> using Ada. This was at not that bad U.S. University. Once, after the end of semester
> students brought to the Dean collection of Classified from local newspapers and
> asked him to find at least one job as that would require Ada. Dean was smart enough
> to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
> smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.

I hope you understand that Ada is not only the syntax, right ? Any good
programmer should be able to switch from one language to another in a couple
of days. But with Ada you have certainly been taught the way to handle large
piece of software, how to structure a software and many other software
engeenering princilples. At least I hope :)

All this is rarely well understood using other languages.

Another way to see that is that learning Ada was certainly a very good
investment for you enven if you don't use it today.

Just my 2 cents,
Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: is ada dead?

[Michal Nowak]

On 01-07-07, at 17:37, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote:

>to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
>smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.

Why you made step backward? I'm switching now from C++ to Ada and I do not
regret it. I will not list here benefits of using Ada - it would make this
post very long, besides everybody here knows them. I still have to do projects
for my studies in C++/Java, but after learning Ada error rate decreased,
programs are more readable. Magic?

>This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job market for Ada
>programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say, C++, Java, VB or COBOL.

I search if there are job opportunities in Ada, before I decided to learn it
- I would be waste of time for learning language which is not used and becoming
extinct. I wanted two find them, because Ada is so good language. And I found
them. Lots of jobs in Ada - big pity none in my country, but world is so small :)
It's true, that there is more offers for C++/Java (what is VB - very basic?)
programmers, but Ada projects are much more interesting. Companies use C++/Java/
Visual Basic, because coding time is a bit faster than in Ada - they faster see
program alive, but...Look, how many bugs are in software. New version of software
are produced one after another, just to fix bugs. But the worse thing is that,
software buyers accepct bugs. What you do if you buy bad-working washing mashine?
Return it back. And software? My idea is to produce good, reliable software.
I don't claim that C++/Java programs must be unreliable. I see that writing
reliable software in Ada is much more easier.

>What regards using Ada in the industry: nothing will change if the average cost
>of SUPPORTED Ada tools is in high 5 digit range. Yes, Ada is better than, say,
>Java, at least for some tasks, but I cannot justify the cost just to have a pleasure
>of working with "better language". Nothing will change if Ada vendors don't drop
>one zero from their price list.

Can be true, can be false. Program lifecycle is not only coding. There is also
maintnace, new versions developent. These phases are less money-consuming in
Ada than in other mentioned languages. One important thing - you buy compiler
one time and use it for long period. It is used for writting many programs.
So I think, that good compiler is worthy investing.

-Mike

------------------------
Mike Nowak
mailto: vinnie@inetia.pl

Re: is ada dead?

[Andrzej Lewandowski]

"Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote in message news:mailman.994589409.11874.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> On 01-07-07, at 17:37, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote:
 >
> Can be true, can be false. Program lifecycle is not only coding. There is also
> maintnace, new versions developent. These phases are less money-consuming in
> Ada than in other mentioned languages. One important thing - you buy compiler
> one time and use it for long period. It is used for writting many programs.
> So I think, that good compiler is worthy investing.
>

I am sufficiektly familiar with the industry and business to respond
just with single word: NONSENSE.

A.L.

Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> "Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote in message news:mailman.994589409.11874.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> > On 01-07-07, at 17:37, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote:
>  >
> > Can be true, can be false. Program lifecycle is not only coding. There is also
> > maintnace, new versions developent. These phases are less money-consuming in
> > Ada than in other mentioned languages. One important thing - you buy compiler
> > one time and use it for long period. It is used for writting many programs.
> > So I think, that good compiler is worthy investing.
> >
> 
> I am sufficiektly familiar with the industry and business to respond
> just with single word: NONSENSE.

Not entirely. Ada is not always the cheapest compiler purchase.
Sometimes it is very competitive in compiler costs. With many other
languages you also must invest in a suite of enabling tools and
libraries to complete your work and your process. Many of these
expenses can be avoided for Ada. The overall cost of Ada development
environments is actually reasonably competitive with C, or C++.

With Java cost is quite variable. Do you use a free compiler, with
no support? You can do this with Ada, if you choose. Do you 
buy a compiler, and a set of JVM implementations for all your
host platforms? Do you buy a develpment tool such as Visual Age?

Most professional development environments require some kind of
professional tool support. Support costs money. With Java you have
the need for ongoing training to keep up with changes in the 
API from release to release. How well do third party compilers track
the Sun API changes? 

Java has a number of attractive features. Unfortunately, language
stability is not yet one of them. New Java versions are mostly
compatible with old versions. How much testing do you need to
perform to determine if your code has problems with the new version
of Java? What costs are related to that testing? 

The truth in industry and business is that most companies have no
idea what software costs. They employ software development and
maintenance staff. They purchase training and tools. They invest
in process development. They still run at CMM level 1. Most of their
software "knowledge" is no more than urban myth. Software projects
in most companies are traditionally over budget and behind
schedule. It is not unheard of for projects to take years to build,
with dozens of software developers, software analysts, software
testers, and software mangers, only to be cancelled. How do the
costs of any one technology, including compilers, languages, or
tools, begin to compare with the cost of uncontrolled software
projects? In fact, one of the biggest cost improvements for some
companies is to find a tool that makes the failure of the project
obvious at an earlier date, saving wasted money.

Changing languages should not be done without a good combination
of technical and financial reasons. Any fundamental technology
change increases the apparent risk of project failure because it 
adds uncertainty. Managers in many companies are working hard to
try to reduce software costs. Many of them actually fear software.
They are willing to try anything to make their bottom line look
better. They are also aware that it is possible to make things
even worse. The result is that they chase technology fads.
When they hear that their peers in some other company have switched
technologies, and they hear a lot of sales hyperbole about how
this new technology will fix their problems, they make the change.
This process is not logical. It is driven by fear and desperation.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Re: is ada dead?

[Jerry Petrey]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> > "Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote:
> >
> > Can be true, can be false. Program lifecycle is not only coding. There is also
> > maintnace, new versions developent. These phases are less money-consuming in
> > Ada than in other mentioned languages. One important thing - you buy compiler
> > one time and use it for long period. It is used for writting many programs.
> > So I think, that good compiler is worthy investing.
> >
> 
> I am sufficiektly familiar with the industry and business to respond
> just with single word: NONSENSE.
> 
> A.L.

This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in the
industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing software
and
only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  That is one of
the 
main reasons most software is over budget and of poor quality or not
even 
ever delivered.

Jerry
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: is ada dead?

[Al Christians]

Jerry Petrey wrote:
> 
> This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in 
> the industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing 
> software and only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  > That is one of the main reasons most software is over budget and of 
> poor quality or not even ever delivered.
> 

Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of 
wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
their product?

For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average. 


Al

Death by analogy Part 1 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

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Hello CLA-

This post reminds me of a post I read a couple of years ago by Bertrand Meyer regarding the use of analogies and the erroneous assumptions that
often underlie them.

In this case, the hypothetical wire cutters offer a 2% productivity boost and cost 100X as much as a competitive set of wire cutters. The obvious
implication is that Ada is similar, i.e. single-digit productivity boost for 100X the cost.

When I read things like this, and many of the other posts in this thread, I wonder if the "Ada offers no benefits worthy of its cost/risk of
vendors going out of business/etc etc" viewpoints are the result of the types of work being done by their posters.

In the sort of work I do, I find C/C++ to be very backward by comparison to Ada, especially in the areas of type safety and concurrent programming
for real-time.

Rather than saying Ada is like a pair of wire cutters that offer a 2% productivity boost for 100X the cost, I would say the situation is more like
a case last year where I did some of my own landscaping. The tools at my disposal were a shovel, a mattock and a 5-gallon pail, i.e. the stuff I
had in my garage. The job took me a few days to complete, but I didn't have to spend a nickel on tools.

Now, I could have gone to NationsRent and rented a Bobcat (mini-backhoe) for a few hundred dollars and done the job in less than a half hour, but
to me it wasn't worth the cost. Does that mean that a Bobcat is a tool that offers a mediocre performance boost for thousands of times the cost of
a shovel?

It really depends on whether you are doing some minor home landscaping or building a highway.

The posts I have read here imply to me that many of the Java/C/C++ devotees are building small-scale projects where the interaction of 1, 2 or 3
programmers is sufficient for the job. At my place of employment, interaction is required between tens of programmers at least as they develop
thousands and thousands of lines of code, and from my experience Ada is *VASTLY* superior for such jobs. In these environments, the cost/benefit
of using Ada is **NOTHING** like a 2% productivity boost for 100X the cost.

Indeed, using C++ for these kinds of jobs is more like building a highway with a mattock and shovel, all the while praising oneself for being
frugal by avoiding the cost of the backhoe, to put forth a counter-analogy ;-) I have been on big projects done in C++ and this experience has
only reinforced my perceptions about the benefits of Ada.

Just because I wouldn't buy my own Bobcat to tinker around my yard doesn't mean a Bobcat isn't a great tool. Likewise, saying that Ada offers
minimal benefits for small-scale/Web-applet type jobs does not therefore imply that it offers no worthwhile benefits to anyone.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> Jerry Petrey wrote:
> >
> > This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in
> > the industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing
> > software and only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  > That is one of the main reasons most software is over budget and of
> > poor quality or not even ever delivered.
> >
>
> Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of
> wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
> average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
> this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
> wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
> next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
> has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
> their product?
>
> For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average.
>
> Al

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Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2443 bytes --]

Hello CLA-

I considered the implied cost/benefit analogy for Ada here to be incorrect, and I addressed that in "Part 1".

As a separate topic, I would also say that RE: development tools for C/C++, the old adage "you get what you pay for" is still true. I have been on
jobs which used the freebie "gcc" tools that come from the RTOS vendor, and I have compared the kind of multi-threaded debugging/etc support that
you get with these tools to those available from third party compiler vendors.

I have heard people make arguments similar to this wire-cutter analogy, e.g. "Yeah, but we get a C/C++ compiler FOR FREE with the operating
system; these other tools cost thousands of dollars per seat! We can't afford that! How much difference could there be?"

It is unfortunate that these kinds of decisions are made at the beginning of a project before their full impact can be known. Only later do
problems like excessive memory usage, poor debugging support, erroneous or inefficient code generation, lack of exception handling etc. become
apparent, and by then it's too late to switch. Money gets wasted in lost productivity every day, and in the end you end up spending far more than
you would have to buy a better tool at the outset.

So, I would say again that even beyond Ada vs. C/C++/Java/C#/fad du jour arguments, there is a "cheap toolset vs. expensive toolset" argument
which is similar in that the "best" answer depends on what kind of job you are doing.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> Jerry Petrey wrote:
> >
> > This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in
> > the industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing
> > software and only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  > That is one of the main reasons most software is over budget and of
> > poor quality or not even ever delivered.
> >
>
> Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of
> wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
> average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
> this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
> wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
> next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
> has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
> their product?
>
> For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average.
>
> Al

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Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians]

Sure, the 2% example is low, but my analogy was 150% payback.  If the
math works, why wouldn't  people go for it?  Risk. Nothing is sure. 
I didn't say that it didn't pay off, but most won't make the investment.
Too much risk. Programming language is a hot-button issue for very
many.  
But it is way overblown.  Management is the number one factor related  
to software productivity.  The change in productivity from changing 
language is unlikely in most cases to exceed 30% or so, according to 
what I have read.  The variability of management is huge in comparison.
Investing in big budget software tools when you don't know what crazy
thing your PHB is going to do next is equally crazy.

What I was trying to illustrate by analogy is the difference between
value-based pricing (which is what the Ada software vendors cling to)
and cost-based pricing with costs spread over many more customers. 
Customers like cost-based pricing with costs spread over many more 
customers.  Most people will join the herd to gain these cost 
advantages. What is the value of food, water, or air?  Aren't we glad
that no one expects us to pay for these things what they are worth?

Consider the firm that is developing software and surviving without 
using Ada.  For example, may they use Java, Cobol, or Fortran to do 
things that are not too difficult with Java, Cobol, or Fortran, and
they are getting by ok.  Why risk a big investment to change language?
No reason.  Along comes a much bigger and more challenging development
opportunity, and they realize that Java, Cobol, or Fortran is not the
right way to go for taking on this bull by the tail.  Would they now
be wise to invest $100k/year+ in Ada tools so that they can rise to 
the occasion?  If they do, the odds are stacked against them.  Moving 
up to the next magnitude of difficulty or different problem domain and
changing languages simultaneous combines to be a big risk.  Not
advisable in the least.  Better they should have developed some good
experience in Ada by doing some minor projects with it over the years
before using it to try for the home run.  But who is going to spend
big bucks annually to license products for minor projects only?  Not
I when my budget gets reviewed.  

No need to argue with my crazy logic.  Just show me a bunch of 
companies developing applicationsoutside of the military and embedded 
systems markets in the 10-to-100-developer range that switched from 
anything else to Ada and succeeded and are still committed to it today.  
I'd be interested to know why and how.

Programming languages mostly propagate organically using low-level
contagion.  This is hindered by high $ price tag.


Al

"Michael P. Card" wrote:
> 
> Hello CLA-
> 
> I considered the implied cost/benefit analogy for Ada here to be incorrect, and I addressed that in "Part 1".
> 
> As a separate topic, I would also say that RE: development tools for C/C++, the old adage "you get what you pay for" is still true. I have been on
> jobs which used the freebie "gcc" tools that come from the RTOS vendor, and I have compared the kind of multi-threaded debugging/etc support that
> you get with these tools to those available from third party compiler vendors.
> 
> I have heard people make arguments similar to this wire-cutter analogy, e.g. "Yeah, but we get a C/C++ compiler FOR FREE with the operating
> system; these other tools cost thousands of dollars per seat! We can't afford that! How much difference could there be?"
> 
> It is unfortunate that these kinds of decisions are made at the beginning of a project before their full impact can be known. Only later do
> problems like excessive memory usage, poor debugging support, erroneous or inefficient code generation, lack of exception handling etc. become
> apparent, and by then it's too late to switch. Money gets wasted in lost productivity every day, and in the end you end up spending far more than
> you would have to buy a better tool at the outset.
> 
> So, I would say again that even beyond Ada vs. C/C++/Java/C#/fad du jour arguments, there is a "cheap toolset vs. expensive toolset" argument
> which is similar in that the "best" answer depends on what kind of job you are doing.
> 
> - Mike
> 
> Al Christians wrote:
> 
> > Jerry Petrey wrote:
> > >
> > > This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in
> > > the industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing
> > > software and only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  > That is one of the main reasons most software is over budget and of
> > > poor quality or not even ever delivered.
> > >
> >
> > Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of
> > wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
> > average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
> > this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
> > wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
> > next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
> > has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
> > their product?
> >
> > For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average.
> >
> > Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)

When you write

>Management is the number one factor related to software productivity.

I am inclined to agree. Good tools will not necessarily compensate for
bad management, but I would argue that good management would equip
their people with good tools!

You also wrote:

>The change in productivity from changing language is unlikely in most
> cases to exceed 30% or so, according to  what I have read

That may be so in many environments (though 20-30 percent is still
pretty significant IMO), but I think there are some cases where it may
be more significant. For example, I was a member of the software team
for the AN/BSY-2 combat system for the Seawolf class submarine. We had
hundreds of software engineers working to develop over one million
lines of Ada code for the combat system, which was fielded on embedded
68K micros with a custom built Ada RTOS.

The US Navy viewed this effort as a true Ada sucecss story (see 
http://www.adaic.org/docs/flyers/sears.shtml).

To quote Admiral Sears regarding Ada83:

"There are limits to the size of software systems which we can
feasibly
build with the technology at hand.  Ada provides the best intellectual
control available today for managing the development of huge software
systems, through its packaging concept, strong typing, and separate
compilation support."

Based on my experience building C++ systems which are MUCH smaller
than the AN/BSY-2, I would say that Ada made all the difference for
that program. We had good managers in place but if C++ had been used,
the Seawolf would never have sailed because we could never have
completed the job in a reasonable timeframe. It would have taken YEARS
longer and cost much more, if indeed it ever could have been made to
work.

In your "language change scenario" you wrote:

> Consider the firm that is developing software and surviving without 
> using Ada.  For example, may they use Java, Cobol, or Fortran to do 
> things that are not too difficult with Java, Cobol, or Fortran, and
> they are getting by ok.  Why risk a big investment to change language?
> No reason.  Along comes a much bigger and more challenging development
> opportunity, and they realize that Java, Cobol, or Fortran is not the
> right way to go for taking on this bull by the tail.  Would they now
> be wise to invest $100k/year+ in Ada tools so that they can rise to 
> the occasion?  If they do, the odds are stacked against them.

I agree that in this scenario a language change adds to the inherent
risk of a bigger job in a new problem domain. But, if they knew their
existing tools wouldn't do the job, isn't there a third option here,
i.e. hire a contractor to do the hard work in <Ada/Eiffel/whatever>
while training your best people and having them work alongside the
contactor(s)? It seems to me that an approach like this could help a
business bridge itself into a new technology without having to take
the "fatal plunge" of going into a new business area while
concurrently using a new technology with a completely unprepared
staff.

Finally, you asked:

> No need to argue with my crazy logic.  Just show me a bunch of 
> companies developing applicationsoutside of the military and embedded 
> systems markets in the 10-to-100-developer range that switched from 
> anything else to Ada and succeeded and are still committed to it today.  
> I'd be interested to know why and how.

OK, but realize here when you say "outside military and embedded
systems" you are excluding the main domains for Ada. That would be
akin to me asking you to show me a bunch of defense contractors that
switched from Ada to Java/C++ for million-line plus real-time
applications that succeeded and are still committed to Java/C++ today!

Anyway, I have no idea how many companies have switched from
C/C++/Java to Ada, but I did find this article in eweek interesting:

http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2769111,00.html

The interesting part (to me) is the passing reference to Ada for
automotive systems:

"Industrial advisory boards also agree, for example, recommending Ada
or Modula-2 ("having fewer insecurities and better type checking") for
writing the software underlying automotive systems. "

That is not a problem domain I normally hear associated with Ada,
though I did know someone who left the AN/BSY-2 program to join one of
the American Big 3 auto companies doing Ada programming.

Did GM/Ford/Chrysler switch from C to Ada for their embedded systems?
I have no idea. If anyone out there does know, please share with us!

Your closing statement

>Programming languages mostly propagate organically using low-level
>contagion.  This is hindered by high $ price tag.

seems correct to me, which is why I think compilers like GNAT and the
$99 version of Aonix's ObjectAda are good things.

- Mike

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians]

"Michael P. Card" wrote:
> 
> OK, but realize here when you say "outside military and embedded
> systems" you are excluding the main domains for Ada. That would be
> akin to me asking you to show me a bunch of defense contractors that
> switched from Ada to Java/C++ for million-line plus real-time
> applications that succeeded and are still committed to Java/C++ today!

It's not like Ada wasn't supposed to be good for banal, hackneyed or 
workaday applications.  It used to be popular amongst the European
banks, but have they stuck with it?  And there was Sage.  When Sage was
in Modula-2, it was used to develop a business-type database app that
was a success with many users (hundreds of public-sector organizations 
???) across the US.  Then Sage was converted to AdaSage, appeared on 
the Walnut Creek Ada CD, and was supposed to make it easy to develop 
run-of-the-mill database applications in Ada.  What share of the 
run-of-the-mill database application market does Ada now hold?  How 
successful has AdaSage been vis-a-vis Modula-2 Sage?


Al

RE: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

From: Bob Leif
To: Al Christians et al.
We built a commercial application with AdaSAGE under DOS (1). One major
problem with AdaSAGE was that it was that it did not use many of the
features of Ada 95; and to a large extent, it was Modula in Ada. However, it
was fast and reliable. From my experience with AdaSAGE, the combination of a
modern Ada database, such as Michael P. Card's FIRM, and an XML based GUI
could create some rich entrepreneurs.

I might note the AdaSAGE's and I believe Ada's biggest problem has been the
DoD's inability to  transfer Ada technology to the commercial sector.
Although US Defense contractors often have excellent technology, it appears,
at least in the case of Ada, that they have had no way to spin-off this
technology.

(1) R. C. Leif, R. Rios, M. C. Becker, C. K. Becker, J. T. Self, and S. B.
Leif, "The Creation of a Laboratory Instrument Quality Monitoring System
with AdaSAGE". Advanced Techniques in Analytical Cytology, Optical Diagnosis
of Living Cells and Biofluids, Ed. T. Askura, D. L. Farkas, R. C. Leif, A.
V. Priezzhev, , and B. J. Tromberg.. A. Katzir Progress in Biomedical Optics
Series Editor SPIE Proceedings Series, Vol. 2678, 232-239 (1996).

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Al Christians
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 9:55 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)


"Michael P. Card" wrote:
>
> OK, but realize here when you say "outside military and embedded
> systems" you are excluding the main domains for Ada. That would be
> akin to me asking you to show me a bunch of defense contractors that
> switched from Ada to Java/C++ for million-line plus real-time
> applications that succeeded and are still committed to Java/C++ today!

It's not like Ada wasn't supposed to be good for banal, hackneyed or
workaday applications.  It used to be popular amongst the European
banks, but have they stuck with it?  And there was Sage.  When Sage was
in Modula-2, it was used to develop a business-type database app that
was a success with many users (hundreds of public-sector organizations
???) across the US.  Then Sage was converted to AdaSage, appeared on
the Walnut Creek Ada CD, and was supposed to make it easy to develop
run-of-the-mill database applications in Ada.  What share of the
run-of-the-mill database application market does Ada now hold?  How
successful has AdaSage been vis-a-vis Modula-2 Sage?


Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians]

"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." wrote:
> From my experience with AdaSAGE, the combination of a
> modern Ada database, such as Michael P. Card's FIRM, and an XML based > GUI could create some rich entrepreneurs.
> 

So, attempting to become a poster child 'rich entrepreneur' on behalf
of Ada I found some materials on-line about FIRM.  It's from Lockheed
and Martin, the same people who have done so well with AdaSage.  From
the web pages, I look for product or ordering info, so I can see how
much it costs to be rich entrepreneur.  No info there.  This is Ada and
military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the same old
story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it. 


Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[William Dale]

Al Christians wrote:
> 
> "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." wrote:
> > From my experience with AdaSAGE, the combination of a
> > modern Ada database, such as Michael P. Card's FIRM, and an XML based > GUI could create some rich entrepreneurs.
> >
> 
> So, attempting to become a poster child 'rich entrepreneur' on behalf
> of Ada I found some materials on-line about FIRM.  It's from Lockheed
> and Martin, the same people who have done so well with AdaSage.  From
> the web pages, I look for product or ordering info, so I can see how
> much it costs to be rich entrepreneur.  No info there.  This is Ada and
> military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the same old
> story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
> 
> Al

The real problem with products like FIRM is that DoD companies have no
mechanism for selling anything.  They simply do not think that way. 
They sell man hours to the government - not products to customers.  All
they can ask for from potential new users is a charge number to spend
support time on.  

Some are thinking of making things like FIRM "Open Source" but such
ideas are so foreign to DoD types (and their lawyers) it gags in their
throats to say the words.  They throw up hugh clouds of FUD and run
around waving their arms about copyrights and patents and liability.

Meanwhile no customers ever see or use the product.  And no money is
made.  And either the stock holders or the US tax payer has paid to
build another gizmo that goes into storage next to the 'Ark of the
Covenant.'  

Who will get to see it? "The best people!"

Not the opinion of my company - just my own ideas.

William Dale 
mailto:n2rhv@arrl.net

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4729 bytes --]

Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-

A minor correction here to Dr. Leif's citation: it isn't my FIRM. I was one member of the excellent team that built
FIRM, and today I am one member of the team that is improving and deploying FIRM's successor (RODEO). Strictly
speaking, the intellectual property rights for FIRM and RODEO belong to Lockheed Martin Corporation and I think the
U.S. Government has "unlimited rights" as well, i.e. Lockheed cannot charge the U.S. Government a "license fee" to use
FIRM inasmuch as it was paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

Anyway, the situation you portray is this:

>This is Ada and military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the same old
>story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

I think the situation is worse than that! Right now, you can't get these particular products no matter how much $ you
have because defense contractors are not set up to be independent software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Defense
contractors are very much (in my mind) like housing contractors. If you want them to build an addition on your house,
you give them a call and they come estimate the job and give you a quote (this is the RFP or Request For Proposal
phase). You haggle on the price, maybe you decide to give up a few square feet or a half bath to get within your budget
(the BAFO or Best And Final Offer process), and then finally you hire them to do the work (going under contract). They
then take longer than they originally estimated to finish the work ;-)

A business set up to operate in this kind of "build-to-order" environment is simply not capable of mastering the other
kind of business model, which would be more like "speculative manufacturing," where you build something you *think*
people will want to buy, thus putting your $$ at risk in hopes enough people will buy your product that you can recoup
your costs and make a profit. This kind of business model relies heavily on marketing and advertising to try to create
interest in the product, and DoD contractors really don't spend a lot of money on that, just like housing contractors
don't do much more than put ads in the Yellow Pages (maybe a billboard now and then).

So, products like FIRM and RODEO are developed as part of the process of building the requested DoD product (Seawolf
submarine, sonar system, EW system, whatever), and the intellectual property rights then lie with a business that is
not capable of turning these things into commercial products. Sure, we have made some half steps at this but there
really is no easy way to do it, and William Dale's post about lawyers is right on. There are a lot of legal nits to
work through when you even try to turn a taxpayer-funded piece of software into a commercial product. There are
probably open source legal considerations as well, and without an established policy on what to do even investigating
these issues will cost $$. Then there's the questions: How big would the market for these kinds of things be? What
would people pay? You have to spend $$ to even get decent answers to these kinds of questions, and in the DoD
contracting world that kind of $$ comes straight out of profit as the government cannot be billed for it. That makes
this kind of investment a non-starter in most places.

The easiest answer (IMO) would be for the US govt to "seed" commercial ventures for these kinds of things by providing
start-up funding to commercialize these products. This seems unfair since the government already paid to develop them,
but there is typically more investment required to make a truly off-the-shelf commercial product beyond what is needed
to build a product as a part of a larger system. The DoD contractors are not paid to spend this extra $$, they are paid
and encouraged to spend as little as possible. They are not motivated to start their own commercial enterprises and
they are usually not even equipped to do so if they wanted to. This leaves a gap that is generally not filled by
anyone.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." wrote:
> > From my experience with AdaSAGE, the combination of a
> > modern Ada database, such as Michael P. Card's FIRM, and an XML based > GUI could create some rich entrepreneurs.
> >
>
> So, attempting to become a poster child 'rich entrepreneur' on behalf
> of Ada I found some materials on-line about FIRM.  It's from Lockheed
> and Martin, the same people who have done so well with AdaSage.  From
> the web pages, I look for product or ordering info, so I can see how
> much it costs to be rich entrepreneur.  No info there.  This is Ada and
> military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the same old
> story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
>
> Al

[-- Attachment #2: Card for Michael P. Card --]
[-- Type: text/x-vcard, Size: 344 bytes --]

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n:Card;Michael
tel;fax:315-456-0441
tel;work:315-456-3022
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org:Lockheed Martin ;Ocean, Radar, and Sensor Systems
version:2.1
email;internet:michael.p.card@lmco.com
title:Principal Software Engineer
adr;quoted-printable:;;Electronics Park=0D=0ABuilding 6, Room 201;Syracuse;NY;13221;USA
fn:Michael Card
end:vcard

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

"Michael P. Card" wrote:

> A business set up to operate in this kind of "build-to-order" environment is simply not capable of mastering the other
> kind of business model, which would be more like "speculative manufacturing," where you build something you *think*
> people will want to buy, thus putting your $$ at risk in hopes enough people will buy your product that you can recoup
> your costs and make a profit.

Yes, and the inability to handle it on the procurement side had a lot to do with the demise of several compiler vendors
(who were following the ISV model), because the expectations were for custom support / product enhancement at commodity
prices.  Witness the (lack of) success of Aonix' windows product, that was priced comparably to Visual Studio, and
approached it in terms of capability.  But Ada customers wanted the kind of support they got with 5-digit development
systems.

By the way, Al, I don't remember selling any 6-digit development systems in the 16 years I was with Alsys/Thomson/Aonix.
Maybe the big R got away with it, but I don't think anyone else did, and few tried.

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4B613B.25659225@mediaone.net>, Ed Falis says...
>
>prices.  Witness the (lack of) success of Aonix' windows product, that was 
>priced comparably to Visual Studio, and approached it in terms of capability.
>But Ada customers wanted the kind of support they got with 5-digit development
>systems.

IANAM (I am not a marketeer - for one thing, I'm sober), but as near as I can
tell, they never tried to sell that system the same way Visual Studio is sold. I
never once saw it on a store shelf next to the VC++, Java, and Delphi boxes, or
in a software catalog. Instead, they used the same outlets that Rational et. al.
use for their high-margin systems. If you don't go for mass sales, how can you
hope to use that business model?

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> In article <3B4B613B.25659225@mediaone.net>, Ed Falis says...
> >
> >prices.  Witness the (lack of) success of Aonix' windows product, that was
> >priced comparably to Visual Studio, and approached it in terms of capability.
> >But Ada customers wanted the kind of support they got with 5-digit development
> >systems.
>
> IANAM (I am not a marketeer - for one thing, I'm sober), but as near as I can
> tell, they never tried to sell that system the same way Visual Studio is sold. I
> never once saw it on a store shelf next to the VC++, Java, and Delphi boxes, or
> in a software catalog. Instead, they used the same outlets that Rational et. al.
> use for their high-margin systems. If you don't go for mass sales, how can you
> hope to use that business model?
>
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Hate to disillusion, but it was attempted, and they were unable to get
shelf-space.  They also tried to pursue bundling into Visual Studio, which went
nowhere.

I was a marketer, and was sober, though those products weren't my responsibility.

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4B6BBA.FC9439C1@mediaone.net>, Ed Falis says...
>
>Hate to disillusion, but it was attempted, and they were unable to get
>shelf-space.  They also tried to pursue bundling into Visual Studio, which went
>nowhere.

Actually, the first half of that does not shock me at all. I understand you
basicly have to *pay* for shelf-space, which can't be easy for a small company. 
So it was indeed tried, but you have to admit that it never really reached
places where the mass market buys. 

>I was a marketer, and was sober, though those products weren't my 

Sorry for the interjection of personal prejudice. But you must have a really
awesome handicap then, right? :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

>
> >I was a marketer, and was sober, though those products weren't my
>
> Sorry for the interjection of personal prejudice. But you must have a really
> awesome handicap then, right? :-)
>

Nah, I'm back in development now ;-)

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians]

Ed Falis wrote:
> 
> By the way, Al, I don't remember selling any 6-digit development 
> systems in the 16 years I was with Alsys/Thomson/Aonix.
> Maybe the big R got away with it, but I don't think anyone else did, 
> and few tried.
> 

It is not easy to speak from authority on this, since prices are not
on-line to reference.  And I don't want to ask about price and be a
nuisance when I know as a rambling and scrambling 1-man consultancy I
can't afford this stuff, anyhow, and the vendors are so nice to make 
possible freely available versions. I have paid for four Ada compilers 
in my time, from four different vendors, and none of them was over 
$2,000.  But it has happened some times in the past when I pointed out 
some problems with the freely available versions of some Ada products 
here on CLA, figuring that CLA is where there are the most users and I 
might get some help,  that a response came back from vendor that  if I 
was a supported customer instead of a 
taker-advantage-of-the-free-goodies-when-I'm-not-even-a-studenter
that the problems would be no problems.  My natural response to such 
messages is, "OK, how much would it cost to get this fixed?", and I have
let that response, however impertinent, issue forth from time to time.  
Then I've got to talk to sales, and it's hard even to get pre-qualified 
to talk to sales.  But the prices I have been exposed to over the years 
run to the order of $1,000 per seat per month and the debugger is extra, 
I think, and then there are these  minimums of six seats (last I heard, 
but I try to avoid hearing, as I said above), and when I start adding it 
all up and multiplying by the duration of the typical project, I'm into 
multiple sheets of paper and six-figures more or less, plus or minus. 

I'm not on CLA to argue.  I don't like to argue.  I don't want to argue.
If anyone doesn't like this kind of idle babbling, they can pre-empt
any argument by publishing a price list and posting a url.  I'm not 
typing about anyone in particular.  Please have mercy. I'm just trying
to explain myself to Ed, not provoke anything, or criticize anyone's
business model. You've got mouths to feed just as I do.  Do it however
you please. TIA for your indulgence. 


Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Marin David Condic]

I'd agree that the "go become a supported user and all your troubles will
vanish" response to problems with a compiler are not going to get very far
if the support contract starts becomming way too expensive for the average
well-paid geek to afford. Its hard to justify a grand or two for a compiler
that maybe you don't have a revenue-generating project to pay for, let alone
a support contract that might be an order of magnitude or more larger. If
the appeal is aimed at getting me to talk my parent corporation into
spending the funds - heck! I can't even talk them into using Ada on a "real"
project to begin with! How am I going to get them to pony up for support? If
its aimed at me as a private citizen - I'm just not that wealthy.

This isn't a complaint, but it is an observation about market realities. The
businessman needs to understand how people view it and adjust the business
plan to provide something people *will* buy.

Microsoft offers basically a newsletter and quarterly updates that are
within the reach (maybe) of an independent developer. They may not be the
model to copy, but it does suggest that folks will buy a compiler with
limited support. How to get that product to the mainstream where it might
generate the critical mass? I don't know, but there is probably an answer.
If your compiler is a "sunk cost" and not generating enough revenue to make
supporting it seem worth the effort, then maybe its time to take a "We Have
Nothing To Lose" approach and put the thing out "as is" somewhere for free
or some nominal cost under $100. Or maybe it needs to be heavily donated to
schools? Or possibly value-added partners can be taken in - companies or
small-time developers who could add something to the product in exchange for
some right to re-market it? Figuring out the right answer requires a good
deal of creativity and a willingness to break the mold.

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


"Al Christians" <achrist@easystreet.com> wrote in message
news:3B4B6F44.8C7CC353@easystreet.com...
> It is not easy to speak from authority on this, since prices are not
> on-line to reference.  And I don't want to ask about price and be a
> nuisance when I know as a rambling and scrambling 1-man consultancy I
> can't afford this stuff, anyhow, and the vendors are so nice to make
> possible freely available versions. I have paid for four Ada compilers
> in my time, from four different vendors, and none of them was over
> $2,000.  But it has happened some times in the past when I pointed out
> some problems with the freely available versions of some Ada products
> here on CLA, figuring that CLA is where there are the most users and I
> might get some help,  that a response came back from vendor that  if I
> was a supported customer instead of a
> taker-advantage-of-the-free-goodies-when-I'm-not-even-a-studenter
> that the problems would be no problems.  My natural response to such
> messages is, "OK, how much would it cost to get this fixed?", and I have
> let that response, however impertinent, issue forth from time to time.
> Then I've got to talk to sales, and it's hard even to get pre-qualified
> to talk to sales.  But the prices I have been exposed to over the years
> run to the order of $1,000 per seat per month and the debugger is extra,
> I think, and then there are these  minimums of six seats (last I heard,
> but I try to avoid hearing, as I said above), and when I start adding it
> all up and multiplying by the duration of the typical project, I'm into
> multiple sheets of paper and six-figures more or less, plus or minus.
>
> I'm not on CLA to argue.  I don't like to argue.  I don't want to argue.
> If anyone doesn't like this kind of idle babbling, they can pre-empt
> any argument by publishing a price list and posting a url.  I'm not
> typing about anyone in particular.  Please have mercy. I'm just trying
> to explain myself to Ed, not provoke anything, or criticize anyone's
> business model. You've got mouths to feed just as I do.  Do it however
> you please. TIA for your indulgence.
>
>
> Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

Al Christians wrote:

>
> It is not easy to speak from authority on this, since prices are not
> on-line to reference.  And I don't want to ask about price and be a
> nuisance when I know as a rambling and scrambling 1-man consultancy I
> can't afford this stuff, anyhow, and the vendors are so nice to make
> possible freely available versions. I have paid for four Ada compilers
> in my time, from four different vendors, and none of them was over
> $2,000.  But it has happened some times in the past when I pointed out
> some problems with the freely available versions of some Ada products
> here on CLA, figuring that CLA is where there are the most users and I
> might get some help,  that a response came back from vendor that  if I
> was a supported customer instead of a
> taker-advantage-of-the-free-goodies-when-I'm-not-even-a-studenter
> that the problems would be no problems.

Al, I understand your point.  Note that I currently work for that vendor,
but I'm speaking for myself, from being in this business a long time.  It's
been rough times for all of us aficionados of the language, regardless of
what our involvement has been.  The vendor I used to work for started out
with the premise of inexpensive Ada, widely-available (after all, it was
started by the language designer), and we made a lot of mistakes along the
way.  Even our successes rarely paid off.  But excepting R&R and to an
extent Meridian, we consistently tried to get Ada to a widespread basis
with reasonable cost more than anyone else.  And it didn't fit the business
context.  The customers we dealt with at that other company wanted
commodity pricing and defense-contractor level support.  There was no way
to deliver both, and I don't think there is now.  Microsoft certainly
doesn't, and neither do any of the other vendors for development products
in the $100 to $600 range.  For us Ada guys, there was the additional
problem of general lack of broader market interest, despite sinking a lot
of money into advertizing and so on.

So, I don't know what the answer is to your dilemma (and you're not the
only person with it).  But what ACT offers in terms of support reflects the
cost to provide it, and I think it also reflects the value rendered in
return.

You've probably used the Visual Studios, and Sun JDK's, and Borland
products.  They're not perfect, and often the quality is well below e.g.
GNAT or ObjectAda.  And just as often, the option for any kind of real
support doesn't exist.  Or if it does, it's part of a "larger" deal with a
concomitant ongoing price tag.  You can't get blood out of stone.

I'm sorry if I'm sounding a bit combative - it's not my intention, but
I guess a fair part of my career has been tied to these issues.  I'm often
not so pleased looking back.

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4B7319.ECD3A4D3@mediaone.net>, Ed Falis says...
>
>I guess a fair part of my career has been tied to these issues.  I'm often
>not so pleased looking back.

Don't feel bad about having tried something worthwile and failed. Never trying
is what would have been sad.

And perhaps the day may yet come when the battle *can* be won.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Marin David Condic]

"Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:3B4B7319.ECD3A4D3@mediaone.net...
> in the $100 to $600 range.  For us Ada guys, there was the additional
> problem of general lack of broader market interest, despite sinking a lot
> of money into advertizing and so on.
>
I grok the broader interest part, but in terms of "advertizing" dollars -
what exactly is "a lot"? I think Coca Cola spends "a lot" on advertizing. I
doubt that any vendors beyond Microsoft and Sun have spent "a lot" relative
to that kind of scale. The thing is, if someone actually *did* spend that
many cubic dollars on promoting Ada and getting it to be a "Household Word"
we'd all be able to kiss C/C++ goodbye.

> So, I don't know what the answer is to your dilemma (and you're not the
> only person with it).  But what ACT offers in terms of support reflects
the
> cost to provide it, and I think it also reflects the value rendered in
> return.
>
No reason to blame ACT or anyone else for charging what they have to in
order to provide a service. I think a fair complaint is that there seems to
be no "middle ground". Either you're on the Defense Contractor level of
support contract or you're left hanging out there twisting slowly, slowly in
the wind. Not much of a problem if you're talking about a highly stable &
reliable product, but if there are new features or bug fixes coming out
frequently, one would like a way to get them quickly without having the
full-boat hand-holding charges.


> You've probably used the Visual Studios, and Sun JDK's, and Borland
> products.  They're not perfect, and often the quality is well below e.g.
> GNAT or ObjectAda.  And just as often, the option for any kind of real
> support doesn't exist.  Or if it does, it's part of a "larger" deal with a
> concomitant ongoing price tag.  You can't get blood out of stone.
>
Maybe you can't get the Defense Contractor level of support for Visual
Studio, et alia, but you can subscribe to get quarterly updates, etc. That's
at least something.

> I'm sorry if I'm sounding a bit combative - it's not my intention, but
> I guess a fair part of my career has been tied to these issues.  I'm often
> not so pleased looking back.
>
We can all look back and see things in the past that maybe we consider less
than stellar achievement or huge successes. But its the process - not the
product. *We* are changed in the process. :-)

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

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> Maybe you can't get the Defense Contractor level of support for Visual
> Studio, et alia, but you can subscribe to get quarterly updates, etc. That's
> at least something.
>
>

Well, we did do that (though the updates were less frequent) with OA for
windows.  What we got were complaints and people still expecting to call and
get "traditional" phone support, even though the terms were clear that there
were something like 30 days installation support provided.  For traditional
support there was a multi-seat license arrangement with an entry point not
dissimilar to gnat level 1 in price.  People were outraged that they had to pay
so much to get support.

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[DuckE]

"Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:3B4B613B.25659225@mediaone.net...
> "Michael P. Card" wrote:
[...]
>
> Yes, and the inability to handle it on the procurement side had a lot to
do with the demise of several compiler vendors
> (who were following the ISV model), because the expectations were for
custom support / product enhancement at commodity
> prices.  Witness the (lack of) success of Aonix' windows product, that was
priced comparably to Visual Studio, and
> approached it in terms of capability.  But Ada customers wanted the kind
of support they got with 5-digit development
> systems.

As an ObjectAda user it is my opinion that the lack of success of Aonix'
windows product likely has little to do with wanting the support of 5-digit
development systems.

Unless support means providing a usable debugger with the system.  Until
version 7.1.2 the debugger was a bad joke.  Still with 7.2 the debugger has
some problems (though few).

When a debugger doesn't allow you to set breakpoints or exammine the content
of arrays of data, or just as bad, incorrectly displays data, it is very
frustrating.  Frustrating enough to move to a different development
environment.  Sometimes frustrating enough to move to a different
programming language that provides a debugging enviroment that works.

In order for ObjectAda to succeed it must be a solid product, and it must
continue to grow and improve.  Unfortunately, about the same time what I
believe is the first viable version of the product was delivered (OA 7.2)
Aonix apparently decided that it was not a product worth the significant
continued investment to to improve.

SteveD

>
> By the way, Al, I don't remember selling any 6-digit development systems
in the 16 years I was with Alsys/Thomson/Aonix.
> Maybe the big R got away with it, but I don't think anyone else did, and
few tried.
>
> - Ed
>
>

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

DuckE wrote:

> As an ObjectAda user it is my opinion that the lack of success of Aonix'
> windows product likely has little to do with wanting the support of 5-digit
> development systems.

I'll continue to disagree about that one.

>
>
> Unless support means providing a usable debugger with the system.  Until
> version 7.1.2 the debugger was a bad joke.  Still with 7.2 the debugger has
> some problems (though few).

I also concede that there were problems in that area.

>  Unfortunately, about the same time what I
> believe is the first viable version of the product was delivered (OA 7.2)
> Aonix apparently decided that it was not a product worth the significant
> continued investment to to improve.
>

Yes, I was part of the dead weight the company relieved itself of ;-)

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[DuckE]

"Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:3B4CBEAD.1A170570@mediaone.net...
> DuckE wrote:
>
> > As an ObjectAda user it is my opinion that the lack of success of Aonix'
> > windows product likely has little to do with wanting the support of
5-digit
> > development systems.
>
> I'll continue to disagree about that one.
>

I'd be interested hearing examples of just what people expect for support.

When doing soft software development, when I encounter a problem with one of
the development tools I generate a minimal subset of the system that
reproduces the problem.  Sometimes I find that the problem is not in fact
with the tool, but with an error on my part.

Once I do generate a small example that reproduces the problem, I report the
problem to the tool vendor.

Is this is the type of support you're talking about, I can't understand more
than $1K per developer seat for the system.

On the other hand, if you're getting calls about "How do I use a protected
type" then I understand the problem.

SteveD

re: UML for Ada

[raj]

My thanks to those who directed me to UMLStudio.
It appears to be just right for my needs. And  yes, it handles Ada
95....

( For those who are interested, it is at
http://www.pragsoft.com/products.html . )

Bizarrely, RogueWave has a UML Studio ( note the space ! ) for MSVC++.
( at http://www.stingray.com/products/umlstudio/ )
What fun ! :-) I wonder who is going to sue whom ! ;-)

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[David Humphris]

DuckE <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote in message
news:q_O27.328129$p33.6632851@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...
> "Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
> news:3B4B613B.25659225@mediaone.net...
>
> As an ObjectAda user it is my opinion that the lack of success of Aonix'
> windows product likely has little to do with wanting the support of
5-digit
> development systems.
>
> Unless support means providing a usable debugger with the system.  Until
> version 7.1.2 the debugger was a bad joke.  Still with 7.2 the debugger
has
> some problems (though few).
>
> When a debugger doesn't allow you to set breakpoints or exammine the
content
> of arrays of data, or just as bad, incorrectly displays data, it is very
> frustrating.  Frustrating enough to move to a different development
> environment.  Sometimes frustrating enough to move to a different
> programming language that provides a debugging enviroment that works.
>
> In order for ObjectAda to succeed it must be a solid product, and it must
> continue to grow and improve.  Unfortunately, about the same time what I
> believe is the first viable version of the product was delivered (OA 7.2)
> Aonix apparently decided that it was not a product worth the significant
> continued investment to to improve.

This is not the case.

Aonix continues to take the Ada products, including ObjectAda for Windows,
forward with new versions.

In fact a new version of ObjectAda for Windows (7.2.1) is due for release
in a couple of months time.  One of the focuses of this product is to make
improvements in the debugger robustness and functionality.

David Humphris
Aonix

> SteveD

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[DuckE]

"David Humphris" <dhumphris@aonix.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9ijlnq$5or$1@reader-00.news.insnet.cw.net...
[,,,]
> This is not the case.
>
> Aonix continues to take the Ada products, including ObjectAda for Windows,
> forward with new versions.
>
> In fact a new version of ObjectAda for Windows (7.2.1) is due for release
> in a couple of months time.  One of the focuses of this product is to make
> improvements in the debugger robustness and functionality.
>

This is good news.

SteveD

> David Humphris
> Aonix
>
> > SteveD
>
>
>

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Greg Bek]

From: Lao Xiao Hai (laoxhai@ix.netcom.com)  wrote: 

>Now, is Rational still in the Ada business?   And are they planning to
>let the rest of world know they are?   Are they improving their Ada
>products?   Do they plan to let those of us in the Ada community know
>about their upgraded products?   Some of us might be interested.

Yes Rational is still in the Ada business.  If you check the certified
compiler listings you will find we are the only vendor to have
certified to the latest ACATS test suite with our 4.0 set of releases

Greg Bek
Product Manager for Apex
Rational Software

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Lao Xiao Hai]

At long last we hear from someone at Aonix.   Does that mean they are
still in the Ada business?    It is really hard to tell.   There seems to
be little in the way of visibility.     Nice to hear they are upgrading
their compiler and development tools.   Did they plan to tell anyone
about this?

Now, is Rational still in the Ada business?   And are they planning to
let the rest of world know they are?   Are they improving their Ada
products?   Do they plan to let those of us in the Ada community know
about their upgraded products?   Some of us might be interested.

I get regular updates in my email from some compiler publishers such as
DDC-I.   I don't consider it spam since I want to know what is happening
with Ada compiler publishers.   Since I hear from DDC-I on a regular
basis, I also tend to recommend them to clients when I know they have
a product that conforms to my client's needs.

I also get regular input from folks at ACT.  Ever since Dave Wood left
Aonix, I get nothing from them.   I see nothing of them.   They seem to
have vanished.  It would not hurt for these Ada compiler publishers to
escalate their visibility among those who are actually Ada advocates,
even if they are reluctant to risk offending those who are not by acknowledging

that, yes, they do support Ada products.

Rational, in particular, has become a sad case.   They built their business on
an Ada business model, made a lot of money on Ada, and now behave as if their
Ada past is something of an embarassment.

We at AdaWorks continue to believe Ada is the best programming language for
a wide range of applications and that is why we have the name of the language
in the name of our company.   The same is apparently true of Ada Core
Technologies.
We don't believe anyone needs to be embarassed about a business model openly
based
on Ada.   A little more openess might just help change some minds about its
viability
in the larger marketplace.

Richard Riehle
richard@adaworks.com


David Humphris wrote:

> DuckE <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote in message
> news:q_O27.328129$p33.6632851@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...
> > "Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
> > news:3B4B613B.25659225@mediaone.net...
> >
> > As an ObjectAda user it is my opinion that the lack of success of Aonix'
> > windows product likely has little to do with wanting the support of
> 5-digit
> > development systems.
> >
> > Unless support means providing a usable debugger with the system.  Until
> > version 7.1.2 the debugger was a bad joke.  Still with 7.2 the debugger
> has
> > some problems (though few).
> >
> > When a debugger doesn't allow you to set breakpoints or exammine the
> content
> > of arrays of data, or just as bad, incorrectly displays data, it is very
> > frustrating.  Frustrating enough to move to a different development
> > environment.  Sometimes frustrating enough to move to a different
> > programming language that provides a debugging enviroment that works.
> >
> > In order for ObjectAda to succeed it must be a solid product, and it must
> > continue to grow and improve.  Unfortunately, about the same time what I
> > believe is the first viable version of the product was delivered (OA 7.2)
> > Aonix apparently decided that it was not a product worth the significant
> > continued investment to to improve.
>
> This is not the case.
>
> Aonix continues to take the Ada products, including ObjectAda for Windows,
> forward with new versions.
>
> In fact a new version of ObjectAda for Windows (7.2.1) is due for release
> in a couple of months time.  One of the focuses of this product is to make
> improvements in the debugger robustness and functionality.
>
> David Humphris
> Aonix
>
> > SteveD

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4B4BF9.12C1E8C@lmco.com>, Michael P. Card says...
>A business set up to operate in this kind of "build-to-order" environment is 
>simply not capable of mastering the other kind of business model, which would 
>be more like "speculative manufacturing," where you build something you *think*

When I was at LMC in Orlando they tried to commercialize their simulation image
generator business by making PC video chips. Their initial product was actually
fairly nice. It ran the Daytona USA consoles, and through a partnership with
Intel, got put in a lot of video boards. 

The problems happened after that. It seemed like they just didn't know how to
run a commercial business, but they knew what one looked like. So they practiced
some slavish cargo-cult style of business building. They separated themselves
from all the LMC support organizations in the building, so that they could be
lean-n-mean, but kept the same top-heavy management structure that the rest of
the org had (if anything, it was even worse). They saw that other commercial
companies give out free sodas, so they gave out free sodas. They saw that other
commercial companies use lots of inexperienced developers, so they refused to
accept transfers from anyone in the plant with more than 2 years of experience.

In the end, their biggest success was in selling the group itself to Intel
(another big company). I don't think they ever did ship a second-generation
chip.

>interest in the product, and DoD contractors really don't spend a lot of money 
>on that, just like housing contractors don't do much more than put ads in the 

Actually, they do. You just don't see them much because you don't golf or hang
out in bars. :-) But their marketing folks have probably never talked to anyone
who didn't have at least $15mil buring a hole in their pocket. They are more
sales people than anything.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians]

"Michael P. Card" wrote:
> 
> Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-
> 
> 
> I think the situation is worse than that! Right now, you can't get 
> these particular products no matter how much $ you
> have because ...
>
> The easiest answer (IMO) would be for the US govt to "seed" 
> commercial ventures for these kinds of things by providing
> start-up funding to commercialize these products. 
>

You are saying (?) that:

1. Contractor can't figure out how to market this unless some one gives
them a contract to figure that out, and

2. Nobody can figure out how to give it away because lawyers turn colors
over the prospect,  but

3. There is some slim change that the government might be able to figure
out how to give entrepreneur funding so that entrepreneur can use the 
government money to buy the product (from the government or from the 
contractor? IDK)  and then be profitable business as a value-added 
reseller of this product to the refractory, yak-fat-extracting, widget
womping, rental repair, and on-line fortune-telling industries? Sounds
like a guaranteed ticket to the Fortune 65535.  Put my name on the list.

BTW, one time previous when I was looking for available Ada database
software, I came across a package on the Ada CD-ROM that was developed
by a branch of the US government (I won't use any names 
because of what I'm going to say)  that wears tin hats and carries 
rifles.  This was some kind of keyed file package that returned data
according to key using a linear search of the entire file for each 
request.  Whether this was first implemented to work with a tape drive,
IDK.  Nothing about this is paranormal, but that it was written this
way, and made available as a reusable component, and published on the
Ada CD is a little bit different from what one would expect from reading
too much CLA, where Ada renames Superb. But maybe the story for Ada is 
not that different from the story for everything else.


Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Ed Falis]

> BTW, one time previous when I was looking for available Ada database
> software, I came across a package on the Ada CD-ROM that was developed
> by a branch of the US government (I won't use any names
> because of what I'm going to say)  that wears tin hats and carries
> rifles.  This was some kind of keyed file package that returned data
> according to key using a linear search of the entire file for each
> request.  Whether this was first implemented to work with a tape drive,
> IDK.  Nothing about this is paranormal, but that it was written this
> way, and made available as a reusable component, and published on the
> Ada CD is a little bit different from what one would expect from reading
> too much CLA, where Ada renames Superb. But maybe the story for Ada is
> not that different from the story for everything else.
>
> Al

Reminds me of the time ;-)

... when we had a fire to put out with a customer because their database
system was killing the compiler.  Took a look at the thing, which had
gratuitous, nearly recursive, instantiation of generics.  Asked the
customer where they got that code.  "Oh, it was something we got out of one
of the repositories".  "Talked to the author"?  "I'll check".

Turns out that the code that got put into this system was designed by the
author as a compiler stress test for generics.  Turning a layer or two of
instantiation inside out fixed the problem.

Who was saying something about management vs language?

- Ed

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Marin David Condic]

In the end, all this stuff is being done by fallible human beings who are
going to do dumb things no matter what language you give them. (It probably
has something to do with the Tower of Babel.) Ada is going to help reduce
some of the truly boneheaded things programmers do when they program, but it
isn't going to stop the more diabolically clever stupidities.

We need to remember that we can't hold Ada up as a panacea or expectations
will be unreasonably high. Saying that it is going to *help* you get to good
code is true and valuable enough.

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


"Ed Falis" <efalis@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:3B4B68D9.1999919F@mediaone.net...
>
> Reminds me of the time ;-)
>
> ... when we had a fire to put out with a customer because their database
> system was killing the compiler.  Took a look at the thing, which had
> gratuitous, nearly recursive, instantiation of generics.  Asked the
> customer where they got that code.  "Oh, it was something we got out of
one
> of the repositories".  "Talked to the author"?  "I'll check".
>
> Turns out that the code that got put into this system was designed by the
> author as a compiler stress test for generics.  Turning a layer or two of
> instantiation inside out fixed the problem.
>
> Who was saying something about management vs language?
>

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3520 bytes --]

Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-

Al Christians wrote:

>You are saying (?) that:
>
>1. Contractor can't figure out how to market this unless some one gives
>them a contract to figure that out, and

No, I am saying that there are some sticky intellectual property, national
security and ownership issues that make this kind of thing difficult. Not
impossible, just difficult. And the contractor is generally not paid to
market things they develop during the course of a contract, so there is the
"who pays" issue...

>2. Nobody can figure out how to give it away because lawyers turn colors
>over the prospect,  but

Again, almost. It can be figured out and probably can be done, but who is
going to pay the lawyers? The contractor is not going to want to spend
profit $ to pay lawyers to make the source code they developed open-source.
Why would they?

>3. There is some slim change that the government might be able to figure
>out how to give entrepreneur funding so that entrepreneur can use the
>government money to buy the product (from the government or from the
>contractor? IDK)

The government has unlimited rights already, and depending on the contract
they may have/ be able to purchase any remaining intellectual property
rights from the contractor. Why would the government do this? Specifically
for the purpose of commercializing defense technology much as they have
already commercialized some space technology. The government has spent
additional money to get technology it already paid for in defense/space
projects into the commercial business world before.

>and then be profitable business as a value-added
>reseller of this product to the refractory, yak-fat-extracting, widget
>womping, rental repair, and on-line fortune-telling industries? Sounds
>like a guaranteed ticket to the Fortune 65535.  Put my name on the list.

That's the idea. The general way this goes, I think, is that the
"commercializer" retains full intellectual property rights to any
enhancements they make to the government-owned stuff. I do not think the
government would get royalties in this kind of arrangement, so the
government is in the role of providing an industrial incentive (corporate
welfare if you like) for the purpose of putting new technology into the
economy, and doubtless they would expect their "investment" to be returned
manyfold by the benefits incurred. Similar arguments are made RE: side
benefits of the space program and the government-funded technology that
eventually made its way into consumer products. I am not prepared to argue
the merits of those arguments, but this is the general idea.

>BTW, one time previous when I was looking for available Ada database
>software, I came across a package on the Ada CD-ROM that was developed
>by a branch of the US government (I won't use any names
>because of what I'm going to say)  that wears tin hats and carries
>rifles.  This was some kind of keyed file package that returned data
>according to key using a linear search of the entire file for each
>request.  Whether this was first implemented to work with a tape drive,
>IDK.  Nothing about this is paranormal, but that it was written this
>way, and made available as a reusable component, and published on the
>Ada CD is a little bit different from what one would expect from reading
>too much CLA, where Ada renames Superb. But maybe the story for Ada is
>not that different from the story for everything else.

Wow! Sounds like the CD needed an editor (I mean the human variety)!!

- Mike


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n:Card;Michael
tel;fax:315-456-0441
tel;work:315-456-3022
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org:Lockheed Martin ;Ocean, Radar, and Sensor Systems
version:2.1
email;internet:michael.p.card@lmco.com
title:Principal Software Engineer
adr;quoted-printable:;;Electronics Park=0D=0ABuilding 6, Room 201;Syracuse;NY;13221;USA
fn:Michael Card
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Ada and UML

[raj]

Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?

Re: Ada and UML

[David C. Hoos, Sr.]

Yes.  See UMLStudio at http://www.pragsoft.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "raj" <israelrt@optushome.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
To: <comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>
Sent: July 11, 2001 12:25 AM
Subject: Ada and UML


> Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
> _______________________________________________
> comp.lang.ada mailing list
> comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
> http://ada.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/comp.lang.ada
> 

Re: Ada and UML

[Nick Williams]

raj wrote:

> Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?


Rational Rose?

Cheers,

Nick.

Re: Ada and UML

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org>, Nick Williams says...
>
>raj wrote:
>
>> Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
>
>
>Rational Rose?

Telelogic TAU does too (I believe that's its name today).

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Ada and UML

[David Humphris]

Ted Dennison wrote
> >raj wrote:
> >
> >> Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
> >
> >
> >Rational Rose?
>
> Telelogic TAU does too (I believe that's its name today).

Aonix Software through Pictures (StP) is another to support Ada.

David Humphris
Aonix

Re: Ada and UML

[Ken Garlington]

"Nick Williams" <nickw@acm.org> wrote in message
news:3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org...
: raj wrote:
:
: > Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
:
:
: Rational Rose?

I've heard rumors that Rose is quietly dropping Ada support?

Re: Ada and UML - Rational dropping Ada?

[Jeff Creem]

Hmm.. I have heard rumors that Rational and several other vendors are
dropping C++ support in favor of C# and Java. C++ is starting to be thought
of as legacy code and it is hard to find new programmers who are even
interested in it. I
suspect in 2-3 years if you are still programming only in C++ you will be
out of a job.
.
.
.
Ok...Truth is I have not heard the above rumor but I am starting it. I have
heard the Rational rumor a few times..Would be kind of nice for a comment
to show up from Rational here about it. I suspect (hope) part of this is
being caused
by Rational dropping the VADS product line (the older Verdix Ada 83 only
compiler)
in favor of Apex (which supports Ada 83 and 95).



"Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote in message
news:eZq47.411$Ow2.150315205@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
> "Nick Williams" <nickw@acm.org> wrote in message
> news:3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org...
> : raj wrote:
> :
> : > Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
> :
> :
> : Rational Rose?
>
> I've heard rumors that Rose is quietly dropping Ada support?
>
>

Re: Ada and UML - Rational dropping Ada?

[Ken Garlington]

I heard this from another development team, who told me they decided to
switch from Ada to C++ after being told by "someone" at Rational that Rose
would be quietly dropping Ada support.

Note that this rumor is reinforced by the Rational web site, whose press kit
on Rose RealTime describes C and C++ support, but not Ada. It also describes
the integration of RT with other Rational products; Apex is conspicuous by
its absence. (Perhaps that's because Apex's data sheet is not available from
the press kit, which includes most other Rational products.) Rational Test
RealTime, on the other hand, still lists Ada support.

Note also that separate data sheets are available for Java, Visual Basic,
and C++ support; an attempt to select the "Rational Rose Professional
Edition for Ada" fail to bring up a similar data sheet.

There is a document describing the integration of Rose 2000e with Ada 83;
there is no similar document I found that described 2001A with Ada 83 or Ada
95.

Finally, there are a number of code generator "partners" listed, but they
all appear to be either Java, C, C++, or Smalltalk.

http://www.rational.com/products/rosert/index.jsp

http://www.rational.com/media/news/presskit/Rose_RT.pdf

http://www.rational.com/products/rosert/6-1faqs.jsp


"Jeff Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message
news:ORr47.1598$qA6.244588@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net...
: Hmm.. I have heard rumors that Rational and several other vendors are
: dropping C++ support in favor of C# and Java. C++ is starting to be
thought
: of as legacy code and it is hard to find new programmers who are even
: interested in it. I
: suspect in 2-3 years if you are still programming only in C++ you will be
: out of a job.
: .
: .
: .
: Ok...Truth is I have not heard the above rumor but I am starting it. I
have
: heard the Rational rumor a few times..Would be kind of nice for a comment
: to show up from Rational here about it. I suspect (hope) part of this is
: being caused
: by Rational dropping the VADS product line (the older Verdix Ada 83 only
: compiler)
: in favor of Apex (which supports Ada 83 and 95).
:
:
:
: "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote in message
: news:eZq47.411$Ow2.150315205@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
: > "Nick Williams" <nickw@acm.org> wrote in message
: > news:3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org...
: > : raj wrote:
: > :
: > : > Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
: > :
: > :
: > : Rational Rose?
: >
: > I've heard rumors that Rose is quietly dropping Ada support?
: >
: >
:
:

Re: Ada and UML

[Simon Wright]

"Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:

> "Nick Williams" <nickw@acm.org> wrote in message
> news:3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org...
> : raj wrote:
> :
> : > Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
> :
> :
> : Rational Rose?
> 
> I've heard rumors that Rose is quietly dropping Ada support?

Depends what you mean by _support_, but I've been working on an
open-source code generator, currently front-ended by Rose (basic
edition). http://www.pushface.org/coldframe/

Re: Ada and UML

[John Kern]

I wonder if you could briefly describe what advantages your program has
over the Ada95 code generation already offered by Rational?

Thanks

Simon Wright wrote:
> 
> "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:
> 
> > "Nick Williams" <nickw@acm.org> wrote in message
> > news:3B4F454D.7090200@acm.org...
> > : raj wrote:
> > :
> > : > Are there any UML tools around that support Ada ?
> > :
> > :
> > : Rational Rose?
> >
> > I've heard rumors that Rose is quietly dropping Ada support?
> 
> Depends what you mean by _support_, but I've been working on an
> open-source code generator, currently front-ended by Rose (basic
> edition). http://www.pushface.org/coldframe/

Re: Ada and UML

[Simon Wright]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
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John Kern <jkern3@NOSPAM.visteon.com> writes:

> Simon Wright wrote:

> > Depends what you mean by _support_, but I've been working on an
> > open-source code generator, currently front-ended by Rose (basic
> > edition). http://www.pushface.org/coldframe/

> I wonder if you could briefly describe what advantages your program
> has over the Ada95 code generation already offered by Rational?

[Sorry for delay in reply, I've been on holiday]

Well, it's open source :-) However, to quote from
http://www.pushface.org/coldframe/architecture.html,

  It's fundamental to the idea of ColdFrame that you don't need to
  build a design model by decorating your clean, beautiful analysis
  model with all sorts of support clutter (lists, queues etc). The
  software architect decides how analysis models are to be translated
  into code, and a mechanical process (applied either by a programmer
  or by a program) applies the rules.

  Examples of commercial products which take this approach are
  Software through Pictures from Aonix and ARTiSAN Software's
  Real-Time Modeler[1].

  It's important that the tool lets the architect adopt different
  strategies depending on circumstances. For example, ColdFrame
  generates quite different code for a class with the stereotype
  �singleton�.

  This need makes it very advantageous to have a complete programming
  environment available while scripting the output. Predetermined
  substitution variables aren't likely to fill the bill.

and from http://www.pushface.org/coldframe/use-cases.html#SEC1

  When code is automatically generated from a model (in the present
  case, a UML model), there are two approaches:

  Use a Design Model 

       A design model is derived from an analysis model by adding
       support classes to map the analysis model to the Software
       Architecture (see section Software Architecture). An example
       would be a container for all the instances of a given class. A
       tool which uses this approach is Rational Rose.

  Use an Analysis model

       An analysis model contains classes and relationships that are
       part of the subject matter of the analyzed subsystem. Code
       which supports the execution of the model (for example,
       navigation from an instance of one class through an association
       to find the set of corresponding instances of another class) is
       automatically generated. Tools which use this approach include
       Software through Pictures from Aonix, Rhapsody from I-Logix,
       iUML from Kennedy-Carter, BridgePoint from Project Technology,
       and the present project.

The Rose alternative to programmability is that extraordinarily
complicated Code Generation Properties dialog box, which gives each of
your developers complete freedom to generate code in different ways
(but only within the limits of variability allowed by the vendor
(bad)).


[1] Actually I'm not so sure about the ARTiSAN product, which I
understand is now available for Ada but haven't seen.

Sure FIRM is lost, but really, who cares

[raj]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 14:39:53 -0400, "Michael P. Card"
<michael.p.card@lmco.com> wrote:


>The easiest answer (IMO) would be for the US govt to "seed" commercial ventures for these kinds of things by providing
>start-up funding to commercialize these products. 

It is probably better to leave it to the marketplace.
After all, it is not as if there are not other competing realtime
oodbms around. ( Check out Mnesia for example.)
Sure FIRM is lost, but really, who cares ....

RE: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

From: Bob Leif
To: Michael P. Card et al.
From my experience with AdaSAGE, I tend to agree with you. The question is
how do we improve DoD technology transfer? The US Congress should be upset
about this. I might note that DoD should NOT be allowed to justify part of
its cost as being reimbursed by technology transfer. The simplest solution
for the DoD contractors is to follow the path taken by most well managed
universities, turn the intellectual property over to its creators.

It might pay to explain this problem to NSF. It would also make a great
story for Science magazine or the equivalent.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Michael P. Card
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 11:40 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)


Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-

A minor correction here to Dr. Leif's citation: it isn't my FIRM. I was one
member of the excellent team that built
FIRM, and today I am one member of the team that is improving and deploying
FIRM's successor (RODEO). Strictly
speaking, the intellectual property rights for FIRM and RODEO belong to
Lockheed Martin Corporation and I think the
U.S. Government has "unlimited rights" as well, i.e. Lockheed cannot charge
the U.S. Government a "license fee" to use
FIRM inasmuch as it was paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

Anyway, the situation you portray is this:

>This is Ada and military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the
same old
>story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

I think the situation is worse than that! Right now, you can't get these
particular products no matter how much $ you
have because defense contractors are not set up to be independent software
vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Defense
contractors are very much (in my mind) like housing contractors. If you want
them to build an addition on your house,
you give them a call and they come estimate the job and give you a quote
(this is the RFP or Request For Proposal
phase). You haggle on the price, maybe you decide to give up a few square
feet or a half bath to get within your budget
(the BAFO or Best And Final Offer process), and then finally you hire them
to do the work (going under contract). They
then take longer than they originally estimated to finish the work ;-)

A business set up to operate in this kind of "build-to-order" environment is
simply not capable of mastering the other
kind of business model, which would be more like "speculative
manufacturing," where you build something you *think*
people will want to buy, thus putting your $$ at risk in hopes enough people
will buy your product that you can recoup
your costs and make a profit. This kind of business model relies heavily on
marketing and advertising to try to create
interest in the product, and DoD contractors really don't spend a lot of
money on that, just like housing contractors
don't do much more than put ads in the Yellow Pages (maybe a billboard now
and then).

So, products like FIRM and RODEO are developed as part of the process of
building the requested DoD product (Seawolf
submarine, sonar system, EW system, whatever), and the intellectual property
rights then lie with a business that is
not capable of turning these things into commercial products. Sure, we have
made some half steps at this but there
really is no easy way to do it, and William Dale's post about lawyers is
right on. There are a lot of legal nits to
work through when you even try to turn a taxpayer-funded piece of software
into a commercial product. There are
probably open source legal considerations as well, and without an
established policy on what to do even investigating
these issues will cost $$. Then there's the questions: How big would the
market for these kinds of things be? What
would people pay? You have to spend $$ to even get decent answers to these
kinds of questions, and in the DoD
contracting world that kind of $$ comes straight out of profit as the
government cannot be billed for it. That makes
this kind of investment a non-starter in most places.

The easiest answer (IMO) would be for the US govt to "seed" commercial
ventures for these kinds of things by providing
start-up funding to commercialize these products. This seems unfair since
the government already paid to develop them,
but there is typically more investment required to make a truly
off-the-shelf commercial product beyond what is needed
to build a product as a part of a larger system. The DoD contractors are not
paid to spend this extra $$, they are paid
and encouraged to spend as little as possible. They are not motivated to
start their own commercial enterprises and
they are usually not even equipped to do so if they wanted to. This leaves a
gap that is generally not filled by
anyone.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." wrote:
> > From my experience with AdaSAGE, the combination of a
> > modern Ada database, such as Michael P. Card's FIRM, and an XML based >
GUI could create some rich entrepreneurs.
> >
>
> So, attempting to become a poster child 'rich entrepreneur' on behalf
> of Ada I found some materials on-line about FIRM.  It's from Lockheed
> and Martin, the same people who have done so well with AdaSage.  From
> the web pages, I look for product or ordering info, so I can see how
> much it costs to be rich entrepreneur.  No info there.  This is Ada and
> military-industrial complex suppliers.  I assume it's the same old
> story: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
>
> Al

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[John Kern]

"Michael P. Card" wrote:
> 
> Anyway, I have no idea how many companies have switched from
> C/C++/Java to Ada, but I did find this article in eweek interesting:
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2769111,00.html
> 
> The interesting part (to me) is the passing reference to Ada for
> automotive systems:
> 
> "Industrial advisory boards also agree, for example, recommending Ada
> or Modula-2 ("having fewer insecurities and better type checking") for
> writing the software underlying automotive systems. "
> 
> That is not a problem domain I normally hear associated with Ada,
> though I did know someone who left the AN/BSY-2 program to join one of
> the American Big 3 auto companies doing Ada programming.
> 
> Did GM/Ford/Chrysler switch from C to Ada for their embedded systems?
> I have no idea. If anyone out there does know, please share with us!
> 

This appears to be a reference to the MISRA Guidelines for C programming
in automotive systems, a summary of which is here:
http://www.misra.org.uk/graphics/miscprev.pdf

One would think than an industry which suffers from huge quality and
recall costs would appreciate a language which helps to minimize
software defects.

Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Marin David Condic]

A thing is worth only what you can get someone to pay you for it. People
sometimes get the idea that the laws of Supply and Demand are irrational or
something that ought to be ignored. (Nurses and schoolteachers do such
valuable work. Why don't we pay them what we pay basketball stars?) Supply
and demand - while not exactly Gas Laws, might just as well be. Nobody has
ever successfully violated them for very long. (If there were only five
nurses in the whole world, we'd probably pay them what we pay Michael
Jordan.)

The "Value" of Ada is what you can get someone to pay you for it. One branch
of calculations might show an economic benefit that would seem to justify a
really high price tag, but a) people have substitutes and b) not everything
that they value is figured into the calculations. Sometimes people are
buying "cheap" because long term considerations just aren't important to
them. (Suppose I'm a garage startup evaluating a $100,000 Ada compiler that
only runs on a $250,000 computer - not far from where things were back in
the early days of Ada83. Someone else offers me a C compiler for a PC free
of charge. Are the long term savings of Ada worth it to me? Or maybe I'm
building products that I know are going to be out of date in 12 months and
that I'm *never* going to maintain them after initial release. Time to
market may be my cost driver. Will I buy an expensive Ada compiler over an
inexpensive C++ compiler?)

Of course, I would probably contend that most of this is moot. There *are*
inexpensive and reasonable quality Ada compilers out there that are suitable
for a whole range of development efforts. Cost can't be what is stopping
people from going there. I'd suspect the issue is more one of a) built in
prejudices of the people making language selections and b) lack of
competitive toolsets. Part A we can hope to deal with only through education
and perhaps bringing in a new generation of software engineers with
different prejudices. Part B we can hope to deal with by examining what
people are using to develop in other languages and duplicate++ what is
available to them there.

None of this comes easy. :-)

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


"Al Christians" <alc@PublicPropertySoftware.com> wrote in message
news:3B4A2B3E.CD91C5DD@PublicPropertySoftware.com...
> advantages. What is the value of food, water, or air?  Aren't we glad
> that no one expects us to pay for these things what they are worth?
>

Re: is ada dead?

[Pat Rogers]

"Al Christians" <alc@PublicPropertySoftware.com> wrote in message
news:3B49D87C.6B349412@PublicPropertySoftware.com...
<snip>
> Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of
> wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
> average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
> this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
> wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
> next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
> has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
> their product?
>
> For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average.

According to the Zeigler Paper (for the case of C and Ada), the productivity
boost of going to Ada was 400% IIRC.  Pretty big boost, for a quite
reasonable -- and comparable -- price!

Re: is ada dead?

[Al Christians]

Pat Rogers wrote:
> 
> 
> According to the Zeigler Paper (for the case of C and Ada), the productivity
> boost of going to Ada was 400% IIRC.  Pretty big boost, for a quite
> reasonable -- and comparable -- price!

YDRC.

The paper doesn't say that at all.  It gives cost per source line
as $10.52 for C and $6.62 for Ada.  OTOH it allows that Ada is more 
verbose than C, so not so much relative difference per delivered
function.  
The figures are weakened some when you consider that Ada and C were not 
tested on identical projects, and this result is closer to whatever I 
said than it is to 400%.  Furthermore, he concludes by saying what I 
typed, that other factors are more important than programming language.  

He attributes at least some (he doesn't say how much) of the advantage
of
Ada not directly to the language itself, but indirectly from the things 
that Ada 'encourages', ie better program design and better
documentation.  
If a manager sees that he'll do better with better program design and 
better documentation, he'll try to encourage that directly before he
goes 
into the big six figures to deploy and train a whole new set of tools. 


Al

Re: is ada dead?

[Florian Weimer]

"Andrzej Lewandowski" <lewandoREMOVE@attglobal.net> writes:

>> In universities (Malaysian, Ok?), programming languages are taught not
>> because of teching the students of programming concepts, but for the
>> sake of market requirement. That's the most pathetic and irresponsible
>> decision.

> This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job
> market for Ada programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say,
> C++, Java, VB or COBOL.  Students invest quite substantial amount of
> money to get a degree, and yes, they expect that this investment
> will bring some return.

I would expect that anyone with a CS degree can learn programming in
any language in a few weeks.  Learning programming languages is easy,
and absorbing the local conventions and rules of a large project is
probably much more time consuming.

Re: is ada dead?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

In article <877kxianb2.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>, "Florian Weimer"
<fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:


> I would expect that anyone with a CS degree can learn programming in
> any language in a few weeks.

You don't even need a CS degree.  I formerly worked at a big company
that tried moving people into IT to keep from having to lay them off
while hiring new IT staff at the same time.  What was immediately
visible to me (if not to management) is that almost anyone can "learn" a
language well enough to write a line of code that will compile.  The bug
jump is from there to being able to write a program that actually works
right.

Languages are ephemeral.  If I were designing a CS curriculum I would
require the students to use a different language every semester: partly
so they would be flexible when they graduated and got a job in the Real
World, partly so they wouldn't develop the One True Language mentality
that you see so often, and partly so they would learn to see beyond the
syntax to the underlying universals.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

One True Language (was: is Ada dead?)

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <9ibs7t$mim$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> writes:

> Languages are ephemeral.  If I were designing a CS curriculum I would
> require the students to use a different language every semester: partly
> so they would be flexible when they graduated and got a job in the Real
> World, partly so they wouldn't develop the One True Language mentality
> that you see so often, and partly so they would learn to see beyond the
> syntax to the underlying universals.

My wife recently took a class in a proprietary language, and asked
the instructor if the language had such a thing as constants that
could be used for array boundaries, thus allowing the dimensions of
the arrays to be symbolic, defined once at the top.

The instructor said there were constants, but using them in that
fashion was not the style of <insert-language-name-here>.  Furthermore,
he did not see any reason for doing that when it was so easy to stick
in a hardcoded number, a method that was (to him) much more clear.

Experimentation in the lab part of the course proved that my wife's
natural instinct was supported by the language, even if not by the
instructor.

I cannot see the instructor giving that answer if he knew 5 other
languages (any languages).

Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <9ibs7t$mim$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, Bobby D. Bryant says...
>Languages are ephemeral.  If I were designing a CS curriculum I would
>require the students to use a different language every semester: partly
>so they would be flexible when they graduated and got a job in the Real
>World, partly so they wouldn't develop the One True Language mentality
>that you see so often, and partly so they would learn to see beyond the
>syntax to the underlying universals.

That's pretty much what my undergrad program did (Tulane, for those of you
taking notes :-) ). I think CS1 and 2 were Pascal, but other *required* courses
used Assembly, C, SQL, and AHPL. Due to electives I also had to use LISP and
Fortran. They were quite up front that they were training us to be able to pick
up practicaly any language. I can also say first hand that I found this exposure
*very* valuable. For instance, I always had trouble getting my mind around
recursion, until I spent a few months programming in LISP.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[Stefan Skoglund]

"Bobby D. Bryant" wrote:
> You don't even need a CS degree.  I formerly worked at a big company
> that tried moving people into IT to keep from having to lay them off
> while hiring new IT staff at the same time.  What was immediately
> visible to me (if not to management) is that almost anyone can "learn" a

Televerket (the swedish state-owned telephone company) did that
stunt in 1994 i think. They were changing switching technology at
that time.

They took network engineers and/or network techs and retrained them as 
system analysts, system programmers and other IT functions.

Result: they got a force of very effective and experienced people with a 
strong belief in the company.

Re: is ada dead?

[Adrian Hoe]

"Andrzej Lewandowski" <lewandoREMOVE@attglobal.net> wrote in message news:<3b47806a_4@news3.prserv.net>...
 
> You are in a good society. I was once teaching Real Time Programming and was
> using Ada. This was at not that bad U.S. University. Once, after the end of semester
> students brought to the Dean collection of Classified from local newspapers and
> asked him to find at least one job as that would require Ada. Dean was smart enough
> to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
> smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.
> 
> This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job market for Ada
> programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say, C++, Java, VB or COBOL.
> Students invest quite substantial amount of money to get a degree, and yes, they
> expect that this investment will bring some return. Generally, there is little room
> to study for "scientific pleasure". They are studying to get skills that will position
> them well on the job market. They will not learn Ada just this is a "better language".
> They will study the language that is visible on the market.





One should study for knowledge and that is the ultimate goal. Today,
education has become very commercialized. Sometimes, good knowledge
was not passed on to students. Not teaching Ada is one of the example.
Students are taught what is deemed to be good for their future career
encounter. They have been capitalized. I believe that good programming
concept and habits should be taught and cultivated when they are still
in universities. Ada has been a good language for more than a decade
and it is still progressing and improving. Ada is a good language for
teaching good programming concept and cultivating good programming
habits, because Ada was built on-top of software engineering
philosophy and very discipline in various areas. Good concepts and
habits are most wanted in many companies.

My company, Lexical Integration, switched to Ada in 1995. We were
experiencing tremendous work load in maintaining source codes. We were
using C/C++ and others and we have more than 500K LOC at that time.
Today, we have surpassed 1 million LOC and is heading towards 2
million LOC and SEI levels. Without Ada, we could not imagine how
we're doing.

From our past employment statistics, 0 out of 10 new employees could
not make it through their first 3 months of employment learning Ada.
They dropped out! Reasons:

1.) C/C++ or/and Java is the only language(s) they learned in school.
It is very hard for them to accept different programming paradigm.
From their work (C/C++), it shows that no discipline and good concepts
are deployed in their codes.

2.) They never taught the complete SDLC process in school. They are
kind of "progrmmer-on-the-fly". Giving a programming task, they will
sit in front of workstations and begin working on codes.

Today, our minimum requirement is knowledge of Pascal if not Ada,
because Pascal is very similar to Ada (or Ada is very similar to
Pascal). Students with knowledge in Pascal is more likely to accept
Ada compare to students of C/C++/Java.

This is the scenario in Malaysia. In fact, we have not encountered any
local software company in Malaysia implements full SDLC. Malaysian
governmenr strives to become one of the world's software exporter and
companies, universities and instituitions coerced the motion. MSC,
Multimedia Super Corridor has been established for the purpose. This
is exactly as James Rogers posted:

"The river is a mile wide and an inch deep."

Will it be so bad for students who know just one more extra
programming language, Ada? If the answer is YES, why take all the
troubles studying? Some Universities shorten their courses from 4
years to 3 years and they are saying that they don't have time to
teach Ada!




> What regards using Ada in the industry: nothing will change if the average cost
> of SUPPORTED Ada tools is in high 5 digit range. Yes, Ada is better than, say,
> Java, at least for some tasks, but I cannot justify the cost just to have a pleasure
> of working with "better language". Nothing will change if Ada vendors don't drop
> one zero from their price list.




You pay ZERO $ for Ada compiler. One can download GNAT for free.
Company can consider to purchase support contract if they think they
need one. After building up their Ada expertise, they can go their
own. I think that the money spend now is worth for the future. We have
to look into the distant future and not the one near your nose. If we
(Lexical) were to save the 5 digits in 1995, I will bet that we are
not here today. (Staff turn-over rate was high before we switched to
Ada.)

Just my 2 cents worth.
Adrian

Re: is ada dead?

[chris.danx]

"tyler spivey" <tspivey8@home.com> wrote in message
news:ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com...
>
> is ada dead?

No.

> is it only used in department of defense?

No.

> is it easy/hard to learn?

Easy.  Get John English's book "Ada 95: the craft of object-orientated design".
It's the best book for someone wanting to learn Ada imo (doesn't matter whether
you know another language, or a complete beginner, it's the business).  Norman
H. Cohens book (2nd edition) is a good follow on.

> will it die soon?

No.

Ada 95 is used and taught in at least the first three years at Glasgow Uni.
When we started they told us the reason they teach it is because it

a) promotes good software design

b) allows rapid development due, in part, to the large number of compile time
checks

c) makes it easier to maintain software


All seem to be true, my development time for apps has been reduced
significantly, and I do find it easier to fix broken code than with Pascal and
C, (it has never been due to dubious statements (like casts and so on) which
were major sources of irritation in C).

There has been a lot of discussion about Ada's popularity, with most ppl
agreeing Ada doesn't have the slice of the pie it deserves.  However, Adas
popularity is growing but I think it's being hindered by the DoD connection.
When I went to see the Uni, I asked the CS recruitment officer which programming
language they taught and she told me Ada.  She then said "it's used by the
United States DoD" or words to those effect.

This made me question it's relevance to me.  I thought that the language would
have capabilities unrelated to the projects I work on.  I couldn't have been
more wrong.  It would have been better if she'd have said something like "parts
of projects like AdaOS or seti@home have been written in it", but that was two
years ago.  Maybe this is just me.



Chris

Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <vxM17.5691$WS4.884877@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com>, chris.danx
says...
>This made me question it's relevance to me.  I thought that the language would
>have capabilities unrelated to the projects I work on.  I couldn't have been
>more wrong.  It would have been better if she'd have said something like "parts
>of projects like AdaOS or seti@home have been written in it", but that was two
>years ago.  Maybe this is just me.

Well...in fairness to her, the SETI@Home Service wasn't around two years ago.

Also, I should point out (because it isn't clear from the above) that the
SETI@Home Service is just an add-on for the official SETI@Home project's windows
text client. As far as I know, there is no Ada being used on the actual
SETI@Home project. 

Still, its awfully nice to think that the project could be used as an explicit
evangelism tool. Its going to be awfully tough to wipe the smile off my face the
rest of the day... :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[chris.danx]

> >This made me question it's relevance to me.  I thought that the language
would
> >have capabilities unrelated to the projects I work on.  I couldn't have been
> >more wrong.  It would have been better if she'd have said something like
"parts
> >of projects like AdaOS or seti@home have been written in it", but that was
two
> >years ago.  Maybe this is just me.

> Well...in fairness to her, the SETI@Home Service wasn't around two years ago.

Sorry for my poor English, that's what i meant by "but that was two years ago".



> Still, its awfully nice to think that the project could be used as an explicit
> evangelism tool. Its going to be awfully tough to wipe the smile off my face
the
> rest of the day... :-)

LOL



Chris

Re: is ada dead?

[Emmanuel Briot]

Vinzent Hoefler <vinzent@MailAndNews.com> writes:
> The other is to start developing lots of "cool" stuff with it. *That*, I
> think >we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
> >(http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
> >debuggers are cool. :-)
>
> Hey, this one _is_ cool.
>
> But, hmm, quite long buglist for an Ada project *ouch* *NO, NO, NO, please
> don't beat me, it's just the big font!*


Not beating you on the head, but:

There are actually several things worth nothing with regards to gvd:

- thanks to Ada, the development was very fast (we started coding at the
  beginning of May 2000, and had a first public release around november I
  think, with a very usable version already.

- The list of "bugs" is in fact not that long. If you look into the file we
  have put in the distribution, it is more of a list of things to do or that
  would be nice to have, ie a list of possible enhancements. There are some
  bugs, admittedly (and we fix some every week, especially related to
  cross-platform development :-().

- Another big win of Ada is the portability: porting from our linux machines to
  a windows host was mostly the matter of rewritting the low-level communication  package (through pipes and ttys). And this package has now been integrated in
  GNAT itself, so the portability would be even easier now :-)
  I do not know of many C projects that are as easy to port...

- GVD might be one of the first free-software Ada project (along with
  Seti@home) that doesn't only target the Ada world.


Now, something not related to you.  I see lots of people suggesting that we
should have lots of Ada applications around to prove that Ada is not
dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few suggestions
for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to develop the
projects!

I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).
There is also AWS, OpenToken, AdaOS,... so there's probably already something
you might be interested in and where your knowledge would be much appreciated.
It would be interesting to know from the authors of the other packages whether
they get patches or not.

Emmanuel

Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <l8g0c5nomd.fsf@berlin.int.act-europe.fr>, Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com> writes:

> Now, something not related to you.  I see lots of people suggesting that we
> should have lots of Ada applications around to prove that Ada is not
> dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
> open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
> say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
> projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few suggestions
> for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to develop the
> projects!
> 
> I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
> lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
> like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).

I think one factor is likely to be the great divide between "supported"
customers of ACT (who get GNAT quickly, in binary for their platform)
and everyone else.  The "everyone else" are those most in a position
to contribute patches.

It doesn't much matter if the rules are the same for those projects
as for GNAT, the perception is that ACT can fund all improvements
with revenues from the supported customers.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Emmanuel Briot]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> I think one factor is likely to be the great divide between "supported"
> customers of ACT (who get GNAT quickly, in binary for their platform)
> and everyone else.  The "everyone else" are those most in a position
> to contribute patches.
> 
> It doesn't much matter if the rules are the same for those projects
> as for GNAT, the perception is that ACT can fund all improvements
> with revenues from the supported customers.



No, this argument is incorrect for the projects I was speaking about (GtkAda,
GVD, Xml/Ada).

At least for the first two, the CVS tree is accessible to everyone read-only
(provided of course they recompile their own version, we do not distribute
daily binaries). It isn't the case yet for the third one, but then it is in a
very early stage of development.

I was also speaking of the ada-mode for Emacs. I am happy to report that I do
get some patches for it (almost always from the same 3 or 4 persons, though).

So everyone should be able to contribute, and see their patches integrated (or
reviewed) into the CVS tree fast enough.

I also agree that supported customers are not expected to send patches (they
have their own projects to work on :-), and after all that's why they are
paying a support contract.

But other users certainly have their own needs, and cannot expect us to do the
enhancements very fast (we simply don't have the time). That's when sending
patches make sense. Instead of having to patch their own private version after
every release of GVD, once their code is integrated into the official sources
they do not need to maintain it anymore for each release. Thus, it saves time
for them, and improves the product for everybody else in the world. Sounds like
a win-win deal...

And this is definitely the way other free-software projects work, even when
there are companies behing them (Gnome/Simian, Linux/Redhat/Suze,.... ).

ACT does fund some internal developments on the revenues from supported
customers (after all, that's where GVD started, as well as several other
tools). We also add enhancements requested by these supported customers.

But if a non-supported user has needs, the best way to see them integrated is
to try and submit patches :-)

Emmanuel

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <l8wv5hgdhy.fsf@berlin.int.act-europe.fr>, Emmanuel Briot says...
>I was also speaking of the ada-mode for Emacs. I am happy to report that I do
>get some patches for it (almost always from the same 3 or 4 persons, though).

Interesting. I started to mention this in my previous post but didn't: My
modularity/extendability theory would predict that your most contributed-to
project would be ada-mode.

As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many contributions from
outside of your customer community, simply because the licensing terms are not
usable for serious outside users. I'm not complaining (and certianly don't want
to start that thread again), just pointing out that this is the choice you made.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Robert Dewar]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<67F27.14089$Kf3.151364@www.newsranger.com>...

> As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many 
> contributions from outside of your customer community, simply because 
> the licensing terms are not usable for serious outside users. 

Well T.E.D. seems to identify "serious outside users" with people
like himself who use the public version of GNAT for developing
proprietary code. This is a small community in any case, and not
one that is likely to contribute much to Free Software projects
(e.g. I can't remember T.E.D. contributing any code to GNAT).

However, a much larger, much more active, and much more interesting
set of serious outside users (from the point of view of outside
contributions) is people who are building and distribution Free
Software components and tools. Such people have been the main
outside contributors to GNAT and its associated technologies, and
I would expect that to be the case.

In addition, our supported customers can and do contribute useful
code, and they have a definite incentive to do so, because if their
modifications are incorporated into the mainline GNAT sources, then
they don't have to keep putting them in themselves.

As for the comment that the lack of binaries made by ACT will inhibit
such contributions, I doubt it. People in a position to make useful
contributions are typically the people who can successfully build
from sources, and we would expect that one important contribution in
the future, as in the past, is these binary ports and builds (e.g.
ports for DOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Amiga, Mac, Nextstep, etc have all
come from volunteers in the Free Software Community.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Florian Weimer]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> As for the comment that the lack of binaries made by ACT will inhibit
> such contributions, I doubt it.

Indeed, the FSF distributes most software only in source code, and not
as precompiled binaries (unless you order their deluxe distribution or
something like that).  In the past, this hasn't been a problem, and
people have contributed patches anyway.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Marc A. Criley]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<67F27.14089$Kf3.151364@www.newsranger.com>...
> 
> > As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many
> > contributions from outside of your customer community, simply because
> > the licensing terms are not usable for serious outside users.
> 
> Well T.E.D. seems to identify "serious outside users" with people
> like himself who use the public version of GNAT for developing
> proprietary code. This is a small community in any case, and not
> one that is likely to contribute much to Free Software projects
> (e.g. I can't remember T.E.D. contributing any code to GNAT).
> 
> However, a much larger, much more active, and much more interesting
> set of serious outside users (from the point of view of outside
> contributions) is people who are building and distribution Free
> Software components and tools. Such people have been the main
> outside contributors to GNAT and its associated technologies, and
> I would expect that to be the case.
> 
> In addition, our supported customers can and do contribute useful
> code, and they have a definite incentive to do so, because if their
> modifications are incorporated into the mainline GNAT sources, then
> they don't have to keep putting them in themselves.

It seems a little disingenuous to take Ted to task for "[using] the
public version of GNAT for developing proprietary code", when I'd wager
that over 95% of ACT's customers use the supported version of GNAT for
developing proprietary code.  Along with the fact that OpenToken is
licensed under the GNAT-modified GPL, so it's no more or less
proprietary than the GNAT library packages.

Ted may not have contributed code to the GNAT product, but he certainly
has contributed code to the Open Source and Ada development community.

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Robert Dewar]

"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<3B4C4301.20274B3B@earthlink.net>...
> It seems a little disingenuous to take Ted to task for "[using] the
> public version of GNAT for developing proprietary code", when I'd 
> wager that over 95% of ACT's customers use the supported version of 
> GNAT for developing proprietary code. 

Sorry, I did not mean to "take Ted to task" here, merely I was pointing
out that this is not a constituency that we are particularly intending
to address.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <5ee5b646.0107101433.fedfed8@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
says...
>
>Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<67F27.14089$Kf3.151364@www.newsranger.com>...
>
>> As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many 
>> contributions from outside of your customer community, simply because 
>> the licensing terms are not usable for serious outside users. 
>
>However, a much larger, much more active, and much more interesting
>set of serious outside users (from the point of view of outside
>contributions) is people who are building and distribution Free
>Software components and tools. Such people have been the main
>outside contributors to GNAT and its associated technologies, and
>I would expect that to be the case.

So you are saying that you don't expect the licensing terms to not have any
delterious effect on contributions to the Gnat XML, because proprietary users
almost never contribute anything anyway? That hasn't been my experience with
OpenToken (which is a similar kind of project serving a different purpose). But
I'll admit the sample size on this one project is small enough to be
unscientific in the extreme. So perhaps I'm wrong. I hope so.

>In addition, our supported customers can and do contribute useful
>code, and they have a definite incentive to do so, because if their
>modifications are incorporated into the mainline GNAT sources, then
>they don't have to keep putting them in themselves.

I hadn't thought about it in that much detail before, but I'd say that would
also make a fair explanation of why OpenToken's "proprietary" users contribute a
lot of code. :-) (I put quotes around "proprietary", because there is a very
large class of users, my present employer included, who don't really distribute
their sources, but prefer to keep their options open.)

>As for the comment that the lack of binaries made by ACT will inhibit
>such contributions, I doubt it. People in a position to make useful

I doubt that too, and would have said so had I seen someone say it. Clearly
there's no way you can contribute without looking at a source distribution.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Robert Dewar]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<lIY27.15277$Kf3.177723@www.newsranger.com>...
> (I put quotes around "proprietary", because there is a very
> large class of users, my present employer included, who don't really 
> distribute their sources, but prefer to keep their options open.)

Well the owner of the copyright on an object always has open options,
but what I mean by proprietary here is precisely that neither the
sources nor the object are Free Software or Open Source in the
technical sense of either term, and it sounds like your present
employer is in this camp, so the term proprietary seems quite
appropriate. Sure, your employer may change their minds on this
issue -- a lot of people have been changing their minds about
opening up their sources recently :-)

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <5ee5b646.0107110830.1a134d7e@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
says...
>
>Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<lIY27.15277$Kf3.177723@www.newsranger.com>...
>> (I put quotes around "proprietary", because there is a very
>> large class of users, my present employer included, who don't really 
>> distribute their sources, but prefer to keep their options open.)
>
>Well the owner of the copyright on an object always has open options,
>but what I mean by proprietary here is precisely that neither the
>sources nor the object are Free Software or Open Source in the
>technical sense of either term, and it sounds like your present
>employer is in this camp, so the term proprietary seems quite
>appropriate. Sure, your employer may change their minds on this

Well, I suppose that's true in the sense that my present employer isn't going to
distribute the software in question (under any license whatsoever) to anyone who
isn't a copyright holder (eg: ourselves or the US Government). But I don't think
you want to define "proprietary" use that way, as it would almost certianly
include ACT as well!

ps. Its a moot issue anyway, as we aren't delivering *any* software to anyone,
copyright holder or no, compiled with Gnat. I'm not sure where anyone got the
idea that we were, but its false. We are using the GreenHills compiler at the
moment. My present interest in Gnat is entirely for my own Free Software
projects, and possible future jobs (for which I'd think we certianly would
require paid support).


---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Robert Dewar]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<yg037.15585$Kf3.189127@www.newsranger.com>...
> Well, I suppose that's true in the sense that my present employer isn't going to
> distribute the software in question (under any license whatsoever) to anyone who
> isn't a copyright holder (eg: ourselves or the US Government). But I don't think
> you want to define "proprietary" use that way, as it would almost certianly
> include ACT as well!

You miss the point entirely, the issue is not whom you distribute to,
it is the conditions under which you distribute (that's what Free
Software is about, the manner of distribution). And proprietary 
software is software that is distributed in some other manner. And
perhaps because of this misunderstanding, you are completely wrong,
this definition definitely does not apply to ACT, the GNAT system
and related tools distributed by ACT are most certainly Free Software
in this sense.

Is the copyright on your software really held jointly by the US
Government and a private company? I doubt it, that would be very
unusual, I think you are talking about data rights, not copyright
here.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison]

In article <5ee5b646.0107140605.5c5d76eb@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
says...
>
>You miss the point entirely, the issue is not whom you distribute to,
>it is the conditions under which you distribute (that's what Free
>Software is about, the manner of distribution). And proprietary 

Yes, but if you don't distribute at all, I don't think it qualifies as either
Free Software, or proprietary.

>this definition definitely does not apply to ACT, the GNAT system
If you have ever created software which you didn't distriibute to anyone, then
you are in the same boat as us (whatever you want to call it).

>Is the copyright on your software really held jointly by the US
>Government and a private company? I doubt it, that would be very
>unusual, I think you are talking about data rights, not copyright
>here.

When I was at LMC, I understood that our contracts usually had us deliver the
sofware to the DoD as DoD-owned software, allowed them to also keep relatively
unencumbered copies for themselves under their own copyright. This was for
non-classified work. I wasn't really aware of these issues when I was doing
classified work, but I suspect we wouldn't have had a need for, or a desire for
keeping copies of classified software around after delivery.

I was told we have a similar situation here, but a closer look at our headers
reveals a different story altogether. Currently, our files appear to contain no
explicit copyright notice, although there is the name of the company and project
at the top. However, there is an interesting "distribution notice" (which I
imagine would be completely incompatable with the GPL, were that an issue). Note
that RAC is our customer, not my employer.

-- DISTRIBUTION "D":  Distribution authorized to Department of Defense (DOD),
-- Raytheon Aircraft Company (RAC), and DOD subcontractors only to protect
-- technical or operational data or information from automatic dissemination
-- under the International Exchange Program or by other means.  This protection
-- covers information required solely for administrative or operational
-- purposes, date of document as shown hereon 3 April 1998 ASC/YTK.

There's also a legal note. I'm a bit unsure how the GPL interacts with such
laws. Since its not a license clash, but rather a legal one, I'd think it would
still allow you to distribute with a GPL-licensed product (if it weren't for the
other clause above). You'd just be subject to prosecution if you gave it to the
wrong person or entity.
-- WARNING:  This document contains technical data whose export is restricted
-- by the Arms Export Control Act (Title 22, U. S. C. 2751 et seq) or
-- Executive Order 12470.  Violation of these export control laws is subject
-- to severe criminal penalties.  Dissemination of this document is controlled
-- under DOD Directive 5230.25

I hope that law doesn't prevent us from separately selling these things to the
Greeks, because that's what we are right now in the process of doing...

I'm guessing (and this is just a guess), that the company name at the top
creates a copyright in my company's name alone, despite the fact that it doesn't
explicitly assert copyright. Thus, despite what I was told verbally and repeated
here, handing it to any other party constitues a "distribution". The
"Distribution D:" clause is essentially a (non Free) license. I guess that's
what I get for not reading "the sources". :-)

Note for the record though, that we are *not* using Gnat as our Ada compiler. 

To get things a little more back on subject, my main complaint about making the
XML parser GPL (with no exemptions) is that there's no incentive for outside
professionals to contribute to it, as they won't be able to use their own work
on future (presumably proprietary) paid projects. I do understand perfectly that
this is a rather selfish complaint (if you turn your head and look at it just
right), except I'm personally not really all that intersted in XML. I've yet to
be convinced that it isn't the new "Java" on the hype machine. Generally I just
see it used for databases, for which CSV would be much better served and is much
better supported. So you can indeed trust that when I make these comments I'm
making them as an Ada supporter and Free Software developer, not as someone
who's just itching to create all kinds of proprietary stuff for free with your
XML software. 

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ken Garlington]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:cUD47.21022$Kf3.263983@www.newsranger.com...
: In article <5ee5b646.0107140605.5c5d76eb@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
: says...

: >Is the copyright on your software really held jointly by the US
: >Government and a private company? I doubt it, that would be very
: >unusual, I think you are talking about data rights, not copyright
: >here.
:
: When I was at LMC, I understood that our contracts usually had us deliver
the
: sofware to the DoD as DoD-owned software, allowed them to also keep
relatively
: unencumbered copies for themselves under their own copyright. This was for
: non-classified work. I wasn't really aware of these issues when I was
doing
: classified work, but I suspect we wouldn't have had a need for, or a
desire for
: keeping copies of classified software around after delivery.

If you're referring to unclassified non-commercial defense articles, then
DFARS 252.227-7013 and 252.227.7014 would be the controlling regulation. I'm
no lawyer, but my understanding is the Government gets "unlimited rights" to
noncommercial software and documentation if they paid for its development.
The DFARS says this means "rights to use, modify, reproduce, release,
perform, display, or disclose computer software or computer software
documentation in whole or in part, in any manner and for any purpose
whatsoever, and to have or authorize others to do so." There may be some
technical distinction between being a "copyright owner" and "assigning a
copyright license," but I can't explain it. I would expect that, if you
wanted to provide non-commercial software of this type to the government
under the GPL, you would have to negotiate limited rights with them.

On the other hand, the rules for commercial software (and to some extent
non-commercial software) were rewritten in 1995, and I believe the GPL is
compatible with those rules. This would include minor modifications to
existing commercial software. See

http://www.gcwf.com/articles/gca/gca_3.html

http://farsite.hill.af.mil/reghtml/regs/far2afmcfars/fardfars/dfars/dfars252
_227.htm#P298_15676


: I was told we have a similar situation here, but a closer look at our
headers
: reveals a different story altogether. Currently, our files appear to
contain no
: explicit copyright notice, although there is the name of the company and
project
: at the top. However, there is an interesting "distribution notice" (which
I
: imagine would be completely incompatable with the GPL, were that an
issue). Note
: that RAC is our customer, not my employer.
:
: -- DISTRIBUTION "D":  Distribution authorized to Department of Defense
(DOD),
: -- Raytheon Aircraft Company (RAC), and DOD subcontractors only to protect
: -- technical or operational data or information from automatic
dissemination
: -- under the International Exchange Program or by other means.  This
protection
: -- covers information required solely for administrative or operational
: -- purposes, date of document as shown hereon 3 April 1998 ASC/YTK.

: There's also a legal note. I'm a bit unsure how the GPL interacts with
such
: laws. Since its not a license clash, but rather a legal one, I'd think it
would
: still allow you to distribute with a GPL-licensed product (if it weren't
for the
: other clause above). You'd just be subject to prosecution if you gave it
to the
: wrong person or entity.

: -- WARNING:  This document contains technical data whose export is
restricted
: -- by the Arms Export Control Act (Title 22, U. S. C. 2751 et seq) or
: -- Executive Order 12470.  Violation of these export control laws is
subject
: -- to severe criminal penalties.  Dissemination of this document is
controlled
: -- under DOD Directive 5230.25
:
: I hope that law doesn't prevent us from separately selling these things to
the
: Greeks, because that's what we are right now in the process of doing...

As I understand distribution statements, they are related to the exporting
of technology outside the U.S., as required by the Arms Export Control Act
or the Export Administration Act. There's two separate issues here --
control of military technology and following commercial export rules. AFAIK,
neither is intimately related to copyright issues. I wouldn't think the GPL
would have anything to do with them. You could release controlled technology
with the GPL; that would make you no more or less liable to prosecution if
you exported it outside the U.S. illegally.

As far as "selling these things to the Greeks" - a business can't export
covered technology (military or commercial) without an export license (or
via certain other technical exceptions). However, the U.S. Government can.
So, if this is a government-to-government sale, or you have a license,
there's no problem.

: I'm guessing (and this is just a guess), that the company name at the top
: creates a copyright in my company's name alone, despite the fact that it
doesn't
: explicitly assert copyright. Thus, despite what I was told verbally and
repeated
: here, handing it to any other party constitues a "distribution". The
: "Distribution D:" clause is essentially a (non Free) license. I guess
that's
: what I get for not reading "the sources". :-)

Again, as far as I know, the distribution statement is unrelated to any
copyright license. (It may be related to an export license, or the lack
thereof, though.)

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[McDoobie]

In article <l8wv5hgdhy.fsf@berlin.int.act-europe.fr>, Emmanuel Briot
<briot@gnat.com> wrote:


> 
> No, this argument is incorrect for the projects I was speaking about
> (GtkAda, GVD, Xml/Ada).
> 
> At least for the first two, the CVS tree is accessible to everyone
> read-only
> (provided of course they recompile their own version, we do not
> distribute
> daily binaries). It isn't the case yet for the third one, but then it is
> in a very early stage of development.
> 
> I was also speaking of the ada-mode for Emacs. I am happy to report that
> I do get some patches for it (almost always from the same 3 or 4
> persons, though).
> 
> So everyone should be able to contribute, and see their patches
> integrated (or reviewed) into the CVS tree fast enough.

> And this is definitely the way other free-software projects work, even
> when there are companies behing them (Gnome/Simian,
> Linux/Redhat/Suze,.... ).
> 
> ACT does fund some internal developments on the revenues from supported
> customers (after all, that's where GVD started, as well as several other
> tools). We also add enhancements requested by these supported customers.
> 
> But if a non-supported user has needs, the best way to see them
> integrated is to try and submit patches :-)
> 
> Emmanuel

I'm all for supporting and patching GVD and such. I'd love to help. The 
problem is that my coding skills arent the greatest at the moment.

What can I do as a novice Ada developer to help in these projects?

I'd help with the Emacs mode, but I'm more of a vi person. ;->

Any info would be appreciated.

McDoobie
chris@dont.spam.me

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Emmanuel Briot]

"McDoobie" <chris@dont.spam.me> writes:
> I'm all for supporting and patching GVD and such. I'd love to help. The 
> problem is that my coding skills arent the greatest at the moment.
> 
> What can I do as a novice Ada developer to help in these projects?
> 
> I'd help with the Emacs mode, but I'm more of a vi person. ;->


Let's not waste such a high motivation :-)

Besides actual coding, such projects are always lacking help in several areas:

- most important is documentation, generally. Especially when, like GVD, they
  were done by people whose native language is not english (we had some people
  proof-read the documentation, but I am sure it could be improved)

- As Robert was saying, in the case of GNAT: porting to other platforms, and
  provide binaries for other platforms. This does require a good knowledge of
  the compilation process, but not necessarily good coding skills.

- In the specific case of GVD: port to other debuggers (we currently only have
  gdb and part of jdb, it would be nice to have others like dbx, ...). This
  doesn't necessarily require a lot of coding, since most of the work can be
  based on the code for gdb, after adapting some regular expressions, and a
  few parsing procedures.
  That would help tremendously, since we do not have such debuggers.

- Of course, detailed bug reports (preferably with code to reproduce) always
  help to improve the global stability of a product.
  Enhancement ideas are always welcome (check the TODO file in the gvd
  distribution first to ensure the ideas are not already there).

- Even if you don't feel too sure of your Ada, I am sure you would still be
  able to contribute, if you really need a feature. Do try it, that's the best
  way to learn anyway.

- Other projects might have other needs, you should contact their authors.

Emmanuel

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Stefan Skoglund]

Emmanuel Briot wrote:
> - In the specific case of GVD: port to other debuggers (we currently only have
>   gdb and part of jdb, it would be nice to have others like dbx, ...). This

Which requires some target with  dbx like some early BSD, SunOS of some
flavour
or HP-UX or IRIX.

And now we jump onto a big problem:
A number of guys with somewhat un-Linux machines has provided access to
different Open Source projects and well the access wasn't really used
in proper way ie no real work done which makes the machine-owner
somewhat pissed.

This reflects onto other OpenSource projects !!

To many of the current crop of OpenSource hackers has a pro-Linux i386
approach and doesn't really care about other targets.
Someone asked for some very linux-only changes on gnome-list lately.
Havoc told him that it was a bad idea due to portability reason.

But pls people when doing your OpenSource projects try to get access to
an IRIX machine of some flavor and or some SunOS machines.
It exists ppl who have such machines and which allows external ssh or
telnet access. the Irix c compiler is by default more picky about your 
programs than gcc for example.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[McDoobie]

In article <3B50A21A.8D2A2@ebox.tninet.se>, Stefan Skoglund
<stetson@ebox.tninet.se> wrote:

>
> Which requires some target with  dbx like some early BSD, SunOS of some
> flavour or HP-UX or IRIX.
> 
> And now we jump onto a big problem: A number of guys with somewhat
> un-Linux machines has provided access to different Open Source projects
> and well the access wasn't really used in proper way ie no real work
> done which makes the machine-owner somewhat pissed.
> 
> This reflects onto other OpenSource projects !!
> 
> To many of the current crop of OpenSource hackers has a pro-Linux i386
> approach and doesn't really care about other targets. Someone asked for
> some very linux-only changes on gnome-list lately. Havoc told him that
> it was a bad idea due to portability reason.
> 
> But pls people when doing your OpenSource projects try to get access to
> an IRIX machine of some flavor and or some SunOS machines. It exists ppl
> who have such machines and which allows external ssh or telnet access.
> the Irix c compiler is by default more picky about your  programs than
> gcc for example.

This is certainly a legitimate concern. And I agree wholeheartedly. The 
problem is that I dont have a couple thousand dollars laying around to
snatch an IRIX/Mips, Alpha, or UltraSparc machine(and those would be 
bottom of the barrel.) 

I would be curious to know how many Open Source programmers can 
actually afford those types of machines.

Now, one possibility does present itself. Suppose you have a team of 
"hackers" that really like to work together. Suppose they form a User 
Group of some sort. Supposing there are enough interested members in
that group, they could team up and purchase a nice workstation for 
compiling and debugging on that platform, and put the workstation under 
the name of thier non-profit organization.

Hypothetically it could work. Not sure if it's practical.  I know that's kinda 
what the local LUG does here with some computer stuff.

Thoughts?

McDoobie
chris@dont.spam.me

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Stephen Leake]

Stefan Skoglund <stetson@ebox.tninet.se> writes:

> <snip>
> But pls people when doing your OpenSource projects try to get access to
> an IRIX machine of some flavor and or some SunOS machines.
> It exists ppl who have such machines and which allows external ssh or
> telnet access. the Irix c compiler is by default more picky about your 
> programs than gcc for example.

So install gcc and gnat, and use that! That's part of the point of
open source; you get to use the right tools!

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Pascal Obry]

Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

> Stefan Skoglund <stetson@ebox.tninet.se> writes:
> 
> > <snip>
> > But pls people when doing your OpenSource projects try to get access to
> > an IRIX machine of some flavor and or some SunOS machines.
> > It exists ppl who have such machines and which allows external ssh or
> > telnet access. the Irix c compiler is by default more picky about your 
> > programs than gcc for example.
> 
> So install gcc and gnat, and use that! That's part of the point of
> open source; you get to use the right tools!

Or send patches to maintainers to have proper IRIX support ! You just can't
expect everybody to have access to every kind of OS!

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Stefan Skoglund]

Stephen Leake wrote:
> So install gcc and gnat, and use that! That's part of the point of
> open source; you get to use the right tools!

gcc at least is worse than the SGI provided one on a MIPS
target but it is also a matter of least common denominator.

If the MIPS c compiler and gcc too compiles your
sw you have a better assurance of your codes portability.

Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Stephen Leake]

Stefan Skoglund <stetson@ebox.tninet.se> writes:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
> > So install gcc and gnat, and use that! That's part of the point of
> > open source; you get to use the right tools!
> 
> gcc at least is worse than the SGI provided one on a MIPS
> target but it is also a matter of least common denominator.

"worse" in what sense? The issue was "you have to write code that
compiles under a lot of non-standard C compilers". Only using gcc,
whether it is standard or not, removes that issue.

> If the MIPS c compiler and gcc too compiles your sw you have a
> better assurance of your codes portability.

There are many aspects of portability. Moving to another operating
system and GUI are hard enough; no need to throw other compilers into
the problem.

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <l8g0c5nomd.fsf@berlin.int.act-europe.fr>, Emmanuel Briot says...
>
>dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
>open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
>say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
>projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few suggestions
>for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to develop the
>projects!
>
>I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
>lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
>like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).
>There is also AWS, OpenToken, AdaOS,... so there's probably already something
>you might be interested in and where your knowledge would be much appreciated.
>It would be interesting to know from the authors of the other packages whether
>they get patches or not.

I actually have 4 free software projects right now: Fodderbot and AdaClips (both
inactive), and OpenToken, and the SETI@Home Service. 

Fodderbot (an expert system for playing Empire) never seemed to get much
interest from anyone. That was OK, as it was really just a school project
anyway. The market it was directed towards already had lots of (better) scripts
available to do what it does, so its understandable that no-one got real
interested in it just because it was "AI".

AdaClips (Ada interface to CLIPS expert system shell) I believe garnered me all
of 2 emails of the "Cool! I needed that" variety. No-one ever submitted
anything. But then it was marked as "inactive" the day I released it, so there
wasn't a lot of incentive I guess.

OpenToken received quite a bit of interest, and has had 2 major contributors
other than myself. Probably up near a quarter of the code in it was submitted by
users, and I have received numerous "patches" or bugfixes.

The SETI@Home service seems to have loads of users (I really need to put a hit
counter on my page). I understand there is even a mirror somewhere in europe. I
get oodles of email from users, but the vast majority of it is from
non-programmers. Most of the rest is feature requests. In the 7 months since its
release, I think I've had one user dive into the sources to pinpoint a problem
for me. I've never had any sources submitted. But then, reliability is one of
its prime goals. It has only had about 3 bugs discovered since inception (and
none were fatal). So perhaps there just hasn't been the need.

But I suspect the reason for the big difference in participation between
OpenToken and SETI_Service is just the nature of the two projects. Anyone using
OpenToken is going to be a programmer, while very few users of SETI_Service seem
to be. Also, OpenToken is designed to be incredibly modular and extendable,
which means it is routine for people to develop their own additional
functionality. The only decision is whether to contribute that back or not. The
SETI@Home Service really only has one small job to do. I try to encourage people
online to add their pet features to the SETI_Service sources, but so far I don't
seem to have had any takers (perhaps I have, but they haven't told me about it).
To do so would require reading through my sources, figuring out what they do,
then modifying them. Adding to OpenToken is simply a matter of making your own
package and extending the appropriate tagged type.

So if there is a lesson to derive from all this mess :-), perhaps it is that the
best way to encourage contributions is to make your project as easily and
modularly extensible as possible. It would be interesting to see a more
controlled study of this theory.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: is ada dead?

[Pascal Obry]

Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com> writes:

> Now, something not related to you.  I see lots of people suggesting that we
> should have lots of Ada applications around to prove that Ada is not
> dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
> open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
> say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
> projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few
> suggestions for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to
> develop the projects!
> 
> I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
> lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
> like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).
> There is also AWS, OpenToken, AdaOS,... so there's probably already something
> you might be interested in and where your knowledge would be much
> appreciated.

I agree 100%.

> It would be interesting to know from the authors of the other packages
> whether they get patches or not.

As one of AWS author I must say that we got some patches from 3 or 4
peoples. But indeed we do not get much. Same for Win32-POSIX, SMTP and others
packages. All this is done on my free time for the Ada community, we have a
rather large community at this point and I think that we should be able to do
some nice stuff together.

As Emmanuel said, there is plenty of active Ada projects in differents field
and certainly everybody should be able to find a project to contribute :)

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Death by analogy Part 2 (was RE: is Ada dead?)

[Michael P. Card]

Hello CLA-

I considered the implied cost/benefit analogy for Ada here to be
incorrect, and I addressed that in "Part 1".

As a separate topic, I would also say that RE: development tools for
C/C++, the old adage "you get what you pay for" is still true. I have
been on jobs which used the freebie "gcc" tools that come from the
RTOS vendor, and I have compared the kind of multi-threaded
debugging/etc support that you get with these tools to those available
from third party compiler vendors.

I have heard people make arguments similar to this wire-cutter
analogy, e.g. "Yeah, but we get a C/C++ compiler FOR FREE with the
operating system; these other tools cost thousands of dollars per
seat! We can't afford that! How much difference could there be?"

It is unfortunate that these kinds of decisions are made at the
beginning of a project before their full impact can be known. Only
later do problems like excessive memory usage, poor debugging support,
erroneous or inefficient code generation, lack of exception handling
etc. become apparent, and by then it's too late to switch. Money gets
wasted in lost productivity every day, and in the end you end up
spending far more than you would have to buy a better tool at the
outset.

So, I would say again that even beyond Ada vs. C/C++/Java/C#/fad du
jour arguments, there is a "cheap toolset vs. expensive toolset"
argument which is similar in that the "best" answer depends on what
kind of job you are doing.

- Mike

Al Christians wrote:

> Jerry Petrey wrote:
> >
> > This is certainly not nonsense.  But don't feel bad.  Many people in
> > the industry are unable to understand the true cost of developing
> > software and only look at the up-front coding costs, tool costs, etc.  > That is one of the main reasons most software is over budget and of
> > poor quality or not even ever delivered.
> >
>
> Suppose you are an electrician and you hear about a new kind of
> wirecutter.  There are studies that say this wirecutter improves
> average productivity by 2%.  If you do the math, you can figure that
> this is worth $2,000 to you over the expected 5 year life of the
> wirecutters.  You go to the store and see $1,295 wirecutter on sale
> next to all the others at $11.  Which pair do you buy?  Which toolmaker
> has biggest market share and good cash flow to finance ways to improve
> their product?
>
> For $1,284 most can think up a reason why they are not average.
>
> Al