Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

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

In article <359ia6$lkj@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Mike Ryer points out that the Ada mandate perhaps encouraged too many
>basic technologies to be developed, and guesses that with no mandate,
>there might have been a smaller more reasonable number. I am afraid
>that number might well have been zero (consider as an example Algol-68 or
>many other languages designed since then).

Naturally, we can all speculate forever on this point. But I find it one
of the more bizarre I've seen lately. If, indeed, Ada was a solid and
sound design for its times, why on earth would nobody have been willing
to invest in its development, even if the DoD did not sound like it would
mandate use?

C++ chugged out of AT&T as a preprocessor, with no mandate; obviously 
companies have invested in it anyway, even before the juggernaut started 
rolling (and in fact, the investment is part of what is keeping the juggernaut
rolling).

In its day, Modula-2 was supported by a number of vendors, with no mandate.
True, Modula-2 is smaller than Ada. True, Wirth made the source code
for an early implementation available for commercialization, for $1000.,
I think it was.

Modula-3 is starting to catch a bit, starting as nothing more than a
joint research project of DEC and Olivetti. It's not quite as big as
Ada (I guess), but gettin' there.

Who invested in Betrand Meyer's Eiffel? Surely some money folks thought
it was a good idea. Bertrand must have been a good salesman. And Eiffel,
around for about 10 years, is starting to come into its own, along with
Smalltalk (which had Xerox behind it, not a mandate). Ada 94 can 
certainly compete with these quite well. These three - Eiffel, M3,
and Smalltalk offer many companies an alternative to C++, which they
are starting to crave. Ada 94 could be a player, but won't be until
it's more than vaporware (I know, GNAT...)

So how come investment money is available for these and not for Ada?
What are Bertrand Meyer and Adele Goldberg and the M3 folks doing right
that we are not doing? Who is backing them?

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)
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"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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