Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[agate!howland.reston.ans.net!bogus.sura.net!darwin.sura.net!uvaarpa!softw]

Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted
in European countries more quickly than in the U.S.  What is(are)
the ROOT cause(s)?

I'm fairly convinced there is no overwhelming technical argument
(though you may give it a try).  And a few years in the real
world has taught me that perception is more influential than
reality :-)

I'm willing to discuss this off-thread.  Just tell me whether
I can use your comments in a summary.  Otherwise, suggest away--
I'm all ears.

Doug
smithd@software.org

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[C. Paul Bond]

In article <1993Apr6.161921.22897@software.org> smithd@software.org (Doug Smith
) writes:
>Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted
>in European countries more quickly than in the U.S.  What is(are)
>the ROOT cause(s)?
>
>I'm fairly convinced there is no overwhelming technical argument
>(though you may give it a try).  And a few years in the real
>world has taught me that perception is more influential than
>reality :-)
>
>I'm willing to discuss this off-thread.  Just tell me whether
>I can use your comments in a summary.  Otherwise, suggest away--
>I'm all ears.

Some ideas:

1. Some of Ada's ancestry is based in CHILL, thus some of the basic
ideas for Ada have existed much longer in the European community.

2. The early popularity of languages like Algol, Simula, and other
related languages in Europe helped stimulate thinking about language
design possibilities.

3. Working in a multilingual environment may have sensitised people to
the how important language is to how we analyze and solve problems.
The result may have been the people were/are faster to realize the
short comings of their programming languages and thus quicker to look
for more expressive languages.

-- 
-- C. Paul Bond         Asset Source for Software Engineering Technology --
-- bondp@source.asset.com    2611 Cranberry Square, Morgantown, WV 26505 --
--                                Phone: 304 594 9817, Fax: 304 594 3951 --

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[Bjarne Stroustrup]

Over the years I have noticed that a new programming language
is invariably more popular on the other side of the Atlantic;
independently of which side you happen to be on at the time.

I wonder if the Pacific has the same effect on language popularity?

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[Gregory Aharonian]

>Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted in
>European countries more quickly than in the U.S.  What is(are) ROOT cause(s)?

    As someone has already mentioned, Europe has a long history of useful
languages similar to Ada (Algol, Simula, Chill, Pascal) that there was
enough recognition by management in Europe of these languages to make the
acceptance and choice of Ada easier.  This is purely a marketing viewpoint:
prior exposure in the commercial media made it accept for Ada evangelists
to make the case for Ada.  In the US, with not much of a history with
these languages, the near virtual absence of such languages in the general
trade press created no prior exposure for such concepts, so that making
the case for Ada has been difficult, if not impossible.

     The other reason is that in some sense, what goes on in Europe is
somewhat irrelevant to the future software industry (an extreme point for
the following reasons).  The entire software and computer industry is
undergoing a massive paradigm shift from centralized mainframes to distributed
processing.  This shift has been made possible by the desktop computer
revolution.  Big mainframes are becoming history, except for having a role
as massive file servers.  Just look at IBM, Fujitsu, and other companies
who have lost income and stock value as thsi point hits home.
     The new players are companies like Microsoft, Novell, Lotus, Borland,
Intel, Apple, and other companies who have grown since the early 1980's
into the powerhouses that they now are, dominating the future of computing
for the foreseeable future.   And all of these companies have been and
are using C/C++, were weaned on C/C++, and will continue to use C/C++.
Many of their employees were in school during the 1980's when C/C++ spread
like wildfire, and are now carrying on in that tradition.
    Thus when management are companies look around to make their decisions,
most of the language exposure seen in the trade press is for C/C++/Smalltalk,
and most of the salespeople they see are from the companies cited above that
are based on C/C++.  Thus it is at great risk from them to choose Ada, as
evidenced by its dismal market share outside of the Mandated world.

    Short of nationalizing Microsoft, the DoD is going to have no chance of
seeing Ada83 or Ada9X win greater market share, and especially not Ada9X if
any of Dr. Ichbiah's concerns prove correct.

    Your question, like many other such questions, are complex questions of
socioeconomics that the DoD has refused to address with regards to Ada.
Until it does, Ada will continue to be a niche language outside the Mandated
world where people spend their own money, undermining implicit assumptions
behind the Mandate.

    For example, I have been privately circulating a proposal to do a study
on the actual demographics of programming language use outside the Mandated
world over the last ten years - a more exhaustive analysis of the type of
demographics I occasionally post to comp.lang.ada.   The response I have
gotten to date is "What's the point?".  It's that attitude that condemns
Ada to its fate as a great niche language.

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization

-- 
**************************************************************************
Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[Mark Bayern]

 
>Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted
>in European countries more quickly than in the U.S.  What is(are)
>the ROOT cause(s)?
>
>I'm fairly convinced there is no overwhelming technical argument
>(though you may give it a try).  And a few years in the real
>world has taught me that perception is more influential than
>reality :-)
>

Doug,

I can't talk about why Ada is accepted in Europe, but I can address
the issue of commercial use of Ada by small firms in the US.  

-- Vendor support is lousy! --

Examples:

1. A west coast (U.S. west coast) vendor supplies a version of Ada
for DOS.  It includes a DOS library to allow you access to DOS
devices.  When they are shown that an update of their system
removed two keys from the keyboard routines, their reply is "Well,
you're right, but we just resell that package, and don't have any
way to support it.  We will report the problem to the vendor." 
What?? That package is sold as an integral and required part of
their system -- yet they can't (or won't support it).  The same
thing occurred with a procedure call to move the file-write
pointer to the end of a DOS file.  Their system also appears to
have a memory leak since long running programs always end in
STORAGE ERROR -- they can't (or won't) support it.  Note the I've
paid them for their Premium Customer Support Plan.  What a joke.

2.  East coast Ada vendor sells DOS versions of Ada and highly
recommends that you also pay for their support service.  I chose
not to buy the support service.  (After all, it didn't help with
the previous vendor.)  Discovered that they have made a design
decision to not put small objects (less than 16 bytes) on the heap
due to the heap overhead.  These objects are never reclaimed and
lead to STORAGE ERROR on long running programs.  When I asked for a
fix for this, I received a fax stating that "I am going to ask
engineering to develop a fix for the ... compiler, but as this is
"unsupported/as is" software it will be low priority." 

Unsupported? Their documentation states:
  "All objects whose visibility is linked to a subprogram, task
   body, or block have their storage reclaimed at exit ...
   Moreover, all compiler temporaries on the heap (generated by such
   operations as functions calls returning uncontrained arrays, or
   many concatenations) allocated in a scope are deallocated up
   leaving the scope." 
Here we've got an example of a vendor that won't make an effort to
make their software match the claims of their manual unless I pay
for support!

3.  A vendor that sells a third party graphics lib for a DOS Ada,
has procedures that all use in IN parameter of type SYSTEM.ADDRESS
for any object that should be an OUT parameter.  For example
instead of using something like:
            procedure VIDEO_SPECS ( MODE : out VIDEO_MODES;
                                   X_MAX : out X_SCREEN_LOCATION;
                                   Y_MAX : out Y_SCREEN_LOCATION);
they chose to use
            procedure VIDEO_SPECS ( mode : in system.address;
                                   x_max : in system.address;
                                   y_max : in system.address);
Then they explain in their manual that they actually use those IN
parameters as address to write the values to.  Certainly not in the
spirit of Ada.  Someday a real good optimizing compiler could
(should?) cause this code to die. 

4.  Pricing -- ever compare the (commercial) prices of Ada to is
competition?  An embedded 386 Ada from my favorite vendor is $25K
plus a _required_ $5k first year support contract.  You can do a
lot C/C++ startup work for 30K!  The Booch components cost $1k for
a 3 year license in Ada.  Rational is selling the C++ version for
$495. (I don't know the licensing terms for C++).

I can't tell you why Ada is succeeding in Europe, but I can tell you
why Ada is joke among small commercial vendors.  Because the
vendors don't want it to succeed, and almost go out of their way to
make it fail. 

(Example #2 was an implementation decision they made intentionally. 
I hope the fact they didn't document it was not intentional. 
However one of the initial concepts for Ada was for realtime
embedded stuff, so intentionally creating a memory leak is beyond
my comprehension.) 

Small firms don't have the time or the desire to debug their tools
-- we want stuff that works, and a vendor that supports their
stuff. These firms make Borland and Microsoft look like
great/grand/and generous folks. 

Mark

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[pipex!uknet!warwick!zaphod.crihan.fr!univ-lyon1.fr!scsing.switch.ch!sicsu]

In article <25231@alice.att.com>, bs@alice.att.com (Bjarne Stroustrup) writes:
: 
: 
: Over the years I have noticed that a new programming language
: is invariably more popular on the other side of the Atlantic;
: independently of which side you happen to be on at the time.
: 
: I wonder if the Pacific has the same effect on language popularity?

Hmm... I'm in Europe and it seems to me that Ada is doing a lot better
over here than it is in the U.S. I have also encountered a lot more
hostility towards C in Europe than I ever did in the U.S.

I would guess that the difference between Europe and the U.S. is that
C was firmly entrenched in the universities in the U.S. while the
universities in Europe used a much wider mix of languages and were thus
more open to accepting a new language.

If the choice is between Pascal and Ada the choice is obvious if you
want to do a big project. If the choice is between C/C++ and Ada
the choice is a lot harder to make. A really big plus for C/C++ is 
that it integrates so well with UNIX. So well in fact that a large
percentage of C programmers don't know what is actually C and what is
UNIX.

Robb

Re: Why is Ada succeeding in Europe?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!wupos]

In <1993Apr6.161921.22897@software.org> smithd@software.org (Doug Smith) writes
:

>Well, it seems fairly obvious that Ada continues to be accepted
>in European countries more quickly than in the U.S.  What is(are)
>the ROOT cause(s)?

>I'm fairly convinced there is no overwhelming technical argument
>(though you may give it a try).  And a few years in the real
>world has taught me that perception is more influential than
>reality :-)

>I'm willing to discuss this off-thread.  Just tell me whether
>I can use your comments in a summary.  Otherwise, suggest away--
>I'm all ears.

I suspect this is primarily due to the larger acceptance of Algol in
Europe.  Over here (in the States), Algol never made it that big and
Pascal was the 'big' popular language until C came along.  I don't
think you can credit it to 'wider use of langauges in Europe or any
such thing.  Look for whatever the reason was for the acceptance of
Algol in Europe while it didn't gain much usage here; I suspect the
same factor is operating with regard to Ada.

[It can't be just the 'more languages taught' /  'new languages more
easily accepted in Europe' bit that Europeans would like to tout,
because if that were the case, C, C++, and Pascal would never have
become popular over here.]

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.