Re: Cohen: "Ada As A Second Language" - 05 Update?

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Chip and Allie Orange" <acorange@comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:Vs2dnYEMs4vRWa7bnZ2dnUVZ_g-dnZ2d@comcast.com...
> Hi Richard,
>
> They [Rational] have reduced their staff, and aren't making much effort in 
> marketing it, but they are still supporting and developing Apex.
>
I have enormous respect for the technical staff at Rational and their
efforts with Ada.   The product continues to be one of the best
available and, until I retired AdaWorks a few years ago, I had
clients who were using Apex and related Ada tools from Rational
successfully.
>
> As far as I can tell, it's the lack of marketing, not support, that gives the 
> impression that they've "lost their way" in regards to Ada.  I also understand 
> that Apex is still considered the market leader in Ada cross-compilers for 
> embedded systems.
>
I am a little out-of-date with my knowledge of who the market leaders
are.  However, I do see a sad lack of leadership in the marketing,
promotion or agressive selling of Ada from a company that was originally
founded to do just that.  Rational was created as an Ada company, right
from the beginning.  Now they seem to be making an attempt to hide
that information from their more Ada-ignorant customers.

Instead of taking a courageous position with regard to Ada, they have
positioned it as a "Oh.  Since you asked, we do have an Ada compiler,
but we don't want to talk about it unless you insist," product.  Rational
was one of the companies that made sure, not malicious intent, but by
inept marketing decisions, that Ada would not find its way into the
commercial marketplace.

They bought Meridian, one of the affordable Ada compilers that had
a built-in library for developing PC applications, and promptly killed it.
They hired some of the best Ada marketing people available such as
Jerry Rudisin and Lori Heyman, and failed to use them effectively in
the promotion of their Ada products.   And a former luminary of the
Ada community ( a former DoD Ada official) told me that he advised
Rational to subdue its visibility as an Ada company and focus on the
non-Ada marketplace.   This was, from an economic perspective,
good advice since they have risen to a powerful position of prominence
in the world of software development tools.   But the decision appears
to have been taken at the expense of Ada, the very technology that
helped them acquire the resources necessary to achieve their current,
and well-deserved success.

After the end of the mandate, a lot of Ada compiler publishers, no longer
able to depend on the sale of overpriced products, fell into hard times.  I
am not very smart about the marketing side of things, but I think that
some of those companies could have turned this into an advantage
instead of a [to use a popular, but silly phrase] "cut and run" decision.

When one considers the current collection of available programming languages
and compares each against the current Ada standard, it is clear that Ada
stands out as a far better choice, in most cases, than those now in favor. C++
is a hideous choice.  Java falls short.    C#, while a little better than Java, 
is
not what it could have been.     Python and Ruby are excellent for some kind
of applications.   Eiffel, while also an excellent language design from which
future Ada language revisions could continue to learn, is a little short of what
we get from Ada, especially for large-scale, safety-critical software.

But the very name, Ada, is met with dersision within the misinformed software
community.   Do we really want software development decisions made on the
basis of bad information.   Do we really want software built with languages such
as C++ that are inherently error-prone?   Do we really want our DoD software
deployed in languages that are as inefficient and full of maintainability 
concerns
as a language such as Java?

Courage is the missing element.  I would love to see the management at Rational
become courageous enough to begin promoting Ada once again.   That would not
require them to hide their other excellent products (I like most of them).  It 
would
simply be a way for them to reinvigorate both their own Ada products, raise
the level of awareness for Ada, and actively acknowledge that they have one of
the most powerful tools for the creation of both military and commercial 
software
available anywhere.  Why would anyone with products as good as theirs want
to "hide their light under a bushel?"

Richard Riehle


> BTW, I am especially appreciative of your book being made available in 
> electronic form, and not just paper.  I do wish more e-books were available 
> for Ada.
>
> Chip
>
>
> <adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message 
> news:Y%KYh.1684$tp5.1456@newssvr23.news.prodigy.net...
>> Dr. Cohen works for IBM and IBM has very little interest in
>> Ada.
>>
>> Even Rational, a company now owned by IBM and originally founded
>> to build Ada compilers and tools, has pretty much lost its way with
>> regard to Ada.
>>
>> It is an economic issue, as well. Since the compiler publishers can no
>> longer charge inflated prices for Ada compilers for a captive customer,
>> as they could during the years of the mandate, the economic incentive
>> has diminished.   That fact, coupled with the fact that IBM, for the
>> most part, has never demonstrated any interest in nor competence
>> in, Ada, rules out any liklihood that Dr. Cohen will given the resources
>> he needs to update his book.
>>
>> I originally intended to update my own book, Ada Distilled.  I had hoped
>> to be able to do so by this Spring.   However, economics again prevails.
>> The school where I teach has abandoned any interest in Ada, and I am
>> required to focus my attention on other topics.   The text of Ada Distilled
>> is in the public domain, pretty much as open source, so anyone who might
>> want to update it, as a consortium, or as an individual, is free to do so. I
>> would only hope that such an effort would be carried out in the spririt of
>> the original work with an emphasis on clarity tempered with brevity.
>>
>> Richard Riehle
>>
>> "pakman" <pakman744@nospam.com> wrote in message 
>> news:YImdnaBvGOMUjK_bnZ2dnUVZ_ualnZ2d@comcast.com...
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>> As a reviewer of Cohen's Ada as a 2nd Language, 2nd ed, I had contacted Mr. 
>>> Cohen and asked him if he had any plans of updating his excellent text for 
>>> Ada 2005.
>>>
>>> He replied that he did not have any plans to revise the text. I suspect his 
>>> work has taken him away from keeping up with Ada 2005.
>>>
>>> Most unfortunate, as I've considered Mr. Cohen's text the be the most 
>>> complete and nearly perfect of all the Ada texts.
>>>
>>> Perhaps if we petition IBM and Mr. Cohen he might reconsider.
>>>
>>> I would be willing to review the text again.
>>>
>>> John Cupak
>>>
>>> "PnkFlyd" <pnkflyd831@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>>> news:1177680878.226297.151180@s33g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
>>>> In a previous thread many people mentioned that they use Cohen's book,
>>>> as do our staff here at my work (15 Ada programmers).
>>>>
>>>> Cohen's website 
>>>> http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/ncohen.index.html
>>>> does not mention any recent activity in the area writing a 3rd edition
>>>> to incorporate Ada05.
>>>>
>>>> Have any of you heard from Cohen any interest in doing so?  Do you
>>>> think there is enough of an interest to make it a financially viable
>>>> option that we could possibly champion?  I would hate to see Cohen's
>>>> excellent book not be picked up by new Ada programmers just because
>>>> the book is "out of date".
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>