Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> Personally, I'd like to think that there *was* some hope that Ada could 
> gain in market acceptance and - if not become the dominant language of 
> the future - at least carve out a nice, healthy, growing segment of the 
> software market.

Ada does "own" a nice, healthy growing segment of the software market. 
I thought that the thrust of this discussion was that the 
safety-critical portion of the market was too small, and Ada needed to 
acquire other market segments where it dominates.

Personally, I think that the need for web servers for companies doing 
web commerce is an area where Ada's strengths will eventually mean that 
it is needed to avoid the hazards associated with other languages. 
There is a large, nasty group of crackers out there, and if they ever 
sniff out the ability to redirect the billions of dollars in e-commerce 
transactions into their accounts, financially safe software will be in 
great demand.

So I think the best way to grow the demand for Ada is to focus on things 
like AWS.  It is currently possible to create robust e-commerce software 
using Apache and other tools, but it is painful. Did you ever wonder why 
many e-commerce sites have a shopping basket, then you go to checkout to 
pay for what you selected?  This allows all of the checkout process to 
be separate, and use https, etc.  So only the checkout software needs to 
be bulletproof.

-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The terrorist enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is 
unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality. Such 
an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased or negotiated with. It 
can only be destroyed--and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the business 
at hand."  -- Dick Cheney