Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!ajpo.sei.cmu.edu!gartm@ucbvax.Berkele y.EDU (Mitch Gart)]

Michael Feldman writes of the Ada vendors:

> (some stuff)
>
> 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. 
>
> (some more stuff)

   Totally untrue.  Believe me, Alsys has really tried to promote Ada
outside the Mandated world.  We have done ad campaigns, trade shows, 
articles, press tours, every idea we can think of to sell Ada.  We 
have spent lots of time, money, and energy.  In past years we have done 
lots of trade shows that are not specifically for Ada or DoD, and this 
year we will do at least a few.  In another recent message on 
comp.lang.ada, Greg Aharonian complained that the Ada vendors will not be 
selling Ada at ObjectWorld.  True, but a counterexample is that we
(Alsys) will be selling Ada at the Embedded Systems Conference, which 
is mostly a non-Ada crowd.

   As another example, Alsys has put major efforts into making Ada
products for environments that are thought of as non-DoD platforms.
Years ago the conventional wisdom was that most Ada users would
work on Vaxes or Unix workstations.  We went ahead and pioneered Ada 
for the IBM PC.  This was a big success.  We also put major, 
expensive, development efforts into producing Ada compilers for IBM 
mainframe environments such as MVS and VM/CMS with the idea of 
getting MIS applications to switch to Ada.  This was not such a success.  
But you can't say we didn't try.

   Right now Alsys (and Meridian) are working on Ada for Windows NT.  
I can't speak for Meridian, but inside Alsys the hope is again that
this product will help Ada to expand into the general programming 
market.

   Yet another example is Ada 9X itself.  The Ada vendors will be
making major investments in implementing 9X, and the object-oriented
and information systems features that will be added are more for the 
general market, to compete with C++ and COBOL, than for the DoD market.  
Upgrading Ada compilers to 9X will be expensive and will be done 
largely to try to compete in the general programming market.

   I share the frustration of Mike, Greg, and others that Ada hasn't
been as big a success in the non-Mandated world as we would like.  
But I think their statements that lay all the blame on the Ada vendors 
are untrue and unfair.  We *are* trying to expand the use of Ada.

	Mitch Gart