Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[europa.eng.gtefsd.com!darwin.sura.net!seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@gatech.edu ( Michael Feldman)]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Jun7230852@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory 
Aharonian) writes:
>
>Of course, thanks to the Mandate, there are virtually no Ada support
>libraries for most applications domains, while despite the problems
>of C, there are hundreds of commercial and thousands of public domain
>support libraries in C.  Thus for a few things, Ada programmers do
>quite well, while for most other applications, Ada programmers can't
>do anything at all.  The Mandate has allow the destruction of a
>commercial Ada business, which despite DoD denials, hurts DoD
>software development and drives up costs.
>
Hogwash. DoD did not force the Ada vendors to take, for ten years,
their characteristic myopic approach to business. For all that I
think the (congressional) mandate was a mistake, I nevertheless
pin the sorry state of the Ada industry squarely where IMHO it
belongs: on a bunch of companies that had the chance to act like
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, developing a government and a commercial
market in parallel, as so many companies have done. 

Alas, they didn't act like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They acted 
like Beltway Bandits, jumping on to what they thought was an infinitely 
long DoD gravy train, blowing off other market sectors and the universities,
until the declining post-Cold War defense situation shook them out of their
awful complacency. I do NOT believe that DoD asked them to be, or
intended that they be, captive DoD contractors. They did it themselves.
Don't blame their shortsightednes and lousy management on the mandate.
It surely _allowed_ these companies to become as they are, but nobody
_forced_ them to. They blew it, Greg, all by their lonesomes.

Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-5296 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
------------------------------------------------------------------------