Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!howland.]

In <1993Jun8.040313.1135@seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) 
writes:

>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.

In other words, they acted in a way that was exactly what could be
expected, given the total lack of economic forces on them.  Now you
want to blame *them* for acting like businesses instead of how you
would have preferred them to act.  Sorry, but folks who ignore history
are doomed to repeat it and history (not to mention basic economics)
teaches us that protected markets are generally going to behave pretty
much like what we've seen Ada vendors do.  It was predictable.

So, minus all the "beltway bandit" emotional diatribes, you're upset
that the companies making the compilers didn't push the language to
get people who weren't interested to use it?  That wasn't their job
(or in their interest).  Businesses maximize profits.  Spending a
bunch of extra money to advertise and 'sell' a language that they've
been gifted with a captive market for would merely be stupid on their
part. 

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