Re: Ada Dot Net ?

["William J. Thomas" <WJThomas@WCVT.COM>]

We'll I would like to thank all of the Ada vendors for replying, I can see
that the future of Ada on the PC is in good hands (as it's always been).

Thank God I earn my paycheck using Ada on embedded systems.  I will just
have to be content knowing that Ada has found her nitch market in safety
critical systems, large complex weapon systems, and a few mission critical
commercial efforts.

As for serious PC Windows development (for things like lab support and test
software) I'm afraid that C# is rapidly winning my heart.

The company I work for is undergoing a serious process improvement effort,
we are standardizing on a great many things (thank God one of the things is
Ada95 for embedded systems, C comes in a rare second and only when Ada is
not available). We are also trying to standardize on the languages used for
future test equipment software development (this type of software is GUI
intensive, and makes extensive use of fancy I/O cards).

Many of the software engineers involved in the standardization effort would
love to use Ada even for this class of applications, but when push comes to
shove Ada can't hold a candle to any of the other languages coupled with
their GUI environments. The MS Visual Studio supported languages can't be
beat for their level of integration into the underlying OS and almost every
I/O board on the market comes with drivers/APIs for their products.

You can't ask an Ada zealot (in his right mind) to strap on one of the
existing PC native Ada compilers (with its inferior Windows GUI development
environment), have him walk into the current market place and expect him to
compete against the likes of ordinance the competition will bring to bear on
the same class of problems. That is the reality of the situation, believe me
I love Ada (spent my 1st honeymoon at the 2nd International Ada Tech
conference, gee maybe that's one of the reasons I had to have a second
honeymoon), but in the area of serious PC Windows based development the
vendors have fallen short of the mark. And from the responses I received on
this posting I can see that the vendors are not doing much (if anything at
all) to rectify this situation.

You'll have to excuse me, I thing I hear the System.Windows.Forms namespace
calling me.


WJT