Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[dog.ee.lbl.gov!overload.lbl.gov!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio -state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!ae@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Arthur]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) says (in part):
> ... the sorry state of the Ada industry [is due to] 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 ...

Probably some did; surely not all.  One company I'm familiar with came
into the business intending to specialize in the highest possible
quality of compiled code.  They quickly realized that this criterion was
not terribly important in many markets and so concentrated on embedded
applications.  Although many of their customers are in the so-called
"mandated" world, others are using Ada because they perceive that it
best meets their needs, and are using this company because they really
care about code quality.

This company has no products for platforms such as PCs or Macs because
such users are rarely willing to pay a lot extra to save the last few
microseconds at run time.  I certainly wouldn't pay on my Mac -- I'm
much more concerned with ease of use.

Otherwise, I agree with the point Mike has made.  Why is there only one
Ada vendor for the Mac?  It would be instructive if some of the vendors
would reply about how they see the market place.  I expect they would
raise some points we haven't seen here up to now.

Art
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Arthur Evans, Jr, PhD           Ada Consultant
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