Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <359i6o$lja@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Note also that the complaints about pricing of Ada products have also often
>been made with a very narrow viewpoint (i.e. what C costs). In fact decent
>COBOL compilers for example, with tools, have always cost about $3000 on
>the PC, and still do!

Which is, I suppose, why COBOL is tremendously popular on PC's. :-)

On the other hand, as you've pointed out before, Realia COBOL (rather,
a version thereof) is shrink-wrapped inside a seemingly popular COBOL text.
Is this book used widely in community colleges and other places where
COBOL is taught?

In looking at C texts the other week, I found at least three with shrink-
wrapped compilers; more if you include C++ texts. One is WATCOM, whose
professional version has gotten good reviews in the C mags; one is
MIX, for years the cheapest "real" C I could ever find, perfectly
acceptable for students; the third is Zortech, recently taken over
(if memory serves) by Symantec. All three books were priced at
about $40.00, which is about the same price as other "thick" C books
with no software.

The only Ada compiler available in text-shrinked form is AETech's,
which can be had in a version of Nick DeLillo's book. I think the suggested
list price is $69.95, which is double the price of the same book without
the compiler. I have shopped a lot of technical bookstores, and often
see Nick's book there, but have _never_ seen the version with the
compiler included. In fact, I thought it was vaporware, but finally got
a copy direct from the publisher (after some prodding). We're not talking
5 years ago, folks, but _right now_.

>It is true that C brought down the price level for compilers in general (and
>in the process made it VERY difficult for anyone to make money making
>compilers for anything -- there are a lot of good C compilers scattered
>by the roadside!)

True. Some of them are shrinkwrapped into $40.00 texts!
>
>I think the main reason that (some) Ada tools were not better was simply
>a lack of resources, so when Mike complains that the vendors blew it by
>not providing better tools, he has to have an idea of where the resources
>would have come from. There are two possibilities:
>
>o  Vendors spent money on something else, which they should not have
>This is hard to see, Mike if you think this, what do you have in mind.

I have stated before that IMHO the Ada companies invested far too much
resources into "me-too" ports. Each code generator costs money; each 
validation costs money; supporting zillion low-volume ports costs money.
At one point a couple of years ago, checking the AdaIC compiler list
revealed ten VMS/VMS compilers and (I think it was) nine Sun3/Sun3
compilers.  For a while I thought "Wow! What great competition!"
but later changed my view to "Gawrsh, they are spreading themselves
thin!"

Each vendor (apparently) thought it had to compete head-to-head with
all the others on _every_ major platform. It seemed absurd to me -
it may have been naive of me to think that the vendors would, de facto,
segment the market more. I cannot believe that each of the 40-50
validated versions from the major vendors paid its way.

I don't know how much more successful Tartan and DDC-I have been with
their more sharply targeted ports. And of course these are not really
tool companies.

>o  If only Ada had been pricede at $100 (or some other low figure), the market
>was so elastic (elasticity >> 1.0) that they would have made a ton of money
>and been able to fund all sorts of stuff. If you believe that you are in my
>opinion a card carrying member of the land of Oz, or some other fantasy world.

Dunno - we can speculate endlessly about this; I don't think either of us
will have a mnopoly on the truth here.

>In fact there was a relatively huge amount of capital injected into the
>Ada market, some of which did indeed generate some very good tools (e.g.
>the support of hardware emulators that Alsys provides, or the Rational
>APex environment), and my guess is that the *only* reason that this money
>was available was the mandate. 

Your guess is as good as mine; rather, mine is as good as yours.
Mine is that if Ada had been portrayed to investors as a _really_ dual-use
technology, even more money might have been there (in the days before
1987-88 or so, when the C++ bandwagon really started rolling).

>A possible exception is the support of
>French banks for Alsys, which might well have been based on being sold
>more generally on the future of Ada [of course the banks lost all their 
>money, so in retrospect, they certainly made a bad investment decision].

I haven't the foggiest idea what happened there. 

>My own view is that the critical thing is for Ada NOT to rely on inventing
>its own tools, but instead to concentrate on being able to take advantage
>of tools for other languages that already exist. 

Hindsight is always 20-20, of course, but doing this - and also developing
e.g. friendlier interfaces to Fortran, to penetrate engineering - might
have been a good idea even 5-6-7 years ago. If any of this was tried,
I certainly did not see it. There was a definite sense that everyone
Ada was _different_ and had to live in its own little world. 

Also, I think more vendor "moral support" for free software, especially
in the bindings area, where no vendor-proprietary stuff needed to be
included, would have creating a rising tide that floated everyone's
boat. Instead, we even had proprietary _math libraries_ for Heaven's
sake! Surely the vendors could've all glommed onto one of the de facto
standard ones, and quietly made sure that it was portable and optimized.
That would've saved a lot of resources - let someone else do the work!

This could've been done in a neutral forum like the SIGAda working groups;
I don't think it really happened, though. (A lot of work was done in
the WG's, but I don;t know whether any of it was filtered back into
the compiler distributions. I don't think so, but will be glad to
stand corrected.

>Now with my GNAT hat on,
>one of the very important aspects of GNAT is that its compilation model,
>an commitment to system standards (calling sequences, debugging information,
>object module formats etc) make taking advantage of existing tools a lot
>easier, and I would certainly like to see other Ada compilers move in the
>same direction (good ideas in GNAT are free for the taking. A number of
>vendors are still afraid of even reading GNAT sources because they are
>afraid of contaminating themselves by doing so -- that's silly, but there
>is only so much effort that I am willing to put in trying to convince other
>vendors to take advantage of GNAT in this way :-) 

I rest my case. Some of them still don't get it, I guess.

>Incidentally, this doesn't
>apply to all vendors, some of whom are looking VERY closely at GNAT and
>definitely copying our ideas, which we find most pleasing. [I know that
>sounds strange to people more accustomed to locking up their sources in
>a safe with armed guards, but free software is another world!]

And it's a world that the vendors can either work at exploiting to their
advantage, or oppose to their death. There are lots of ways to glom onto
GNAT; it takes some creative thought, though. I hope the vendors have
got some creative people in their shops...:-)

[Just last night I got yet another e-mail missive from a vendor principal,
opining that GNAT is unfair competition. I will not identify the vendor,
but note that the company in question would benefit, IMHO, from glomming
onto GNAT instead of fighting it.]

Lest I be accused of "bashing" again, all of this stuff I've been writing
has been not to point the finger of blame, but rather to see if we can
learn some lessons, so that we get it right the second time. Simply
reacting to the identification of problems by calling it "vendor bashing"
will not move us forward. Owning up to the problems will get us in the 
right direction (at least I hope so).

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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