Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

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

In article <35j1u5$re1@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>Yes, well there are two big mistakes that non-business oriented technical
>people make. First, they think that being technically best is a guarantee
>of success, and second, they think that not being technically best is a
>recipe for failure. Mike, there are dozens of companies around that have
>been destroyed by technically oriented management that did not understand
>how relatively unimportant technical superiority ranks on the scale of
>things.

Certainly - did I imply otherwise? My statement was only that Ada's own
_proponents_, in the main, did not act on the potential for Ada as a
dual-use technology. They already _had_ the good thing; they made too
little of it, simply by targeting only (or mainly) government projects.

>Such matters as perceived and actual levels of support, estimation of
>financial soundness of the companies involved, size of the companies
>involved, time to market, etc. etc often play a much larger role.

Is this a commentary on the Ada companies?

>If you think of Modula-2 and Modula-3 as commercial successes which you
>are sad that Ada was not able to emulate, then you really have a peculiar
>view of the market. 

No, all I said is that the proponents of M2 and M3 were never timid
about trying to create enthusiasm (markets, if you will). The jury is
out on M3; we'll see what happens as the GNU M3 front end matures.

Modula-2 is another story - we can engage in lots of speculation here
too, but my own experience leads me to conjecture that M2 never really
caught fire - even in the universities - because Niklaus Wirth never
gave the "market" a chance to stabilize. He published _four_ editions
of his book (the de facto standard) in less than ten years, each version
_slightly_ different from the others. It drove implementers nuts - if
they supported the 2nd edition, while their competitor supported the 3rd,
the 2nd-edition compiler was flamed as "old". 

Scratch the surface of the DOS M2 compilers, and you find real but subtle 
incompatibilities due to different editions of PIM ("Programming in Modula-2").
I gave up on it; so did others. Trying to teach a course on M2 concurrency 
was great fun - all my code was larded up with commented-out sections, to 
be un-commented experimentally dependening on which compiler the student 
had. An ad hoc equivalent of #IFEDFs.

I don;t know if the M2 standard was ever adopted; it hardly matters any more.
And of course Wirth has walked away from it, and has nothing at all to
do with M3, as far as I know.

>Mike, there is an easy experiment you can perform now. See if you can
>get any venture capitalist to put up money to support work on Ada 9X.
>All I can say is good luck if you try this! To be fair, you should inform
>the venture capitalists that you do not expect the mandate to be maintained,
>and they should discount the effect of the mandate in estimating the future
>market potential of Ada. 

Oh, I agree. I think it's really too late. Support for Ada 9X will 
have to be re-built from the grass roots up, starting with GNAT. Ada is
too tainted already to be attractive to non-technical money types, 
whatever the digits attached to its name.

>I am certainly not saying that you can succeed with rubbish products, no
>matter how good other things look (consider IBM's failures with the
>PC Jr and the RT as illustrations of this). Equally, there are cases where
>a product really *does* succeed on technical excellence alone, but they
>are few and far between.

Of course. But Ada has technical excellence _and_ a mandate, and that has
always seemed to me to be a quite good basis for building a market outward
from that "platform". But instead of seeing the mandate as _seeding_
an industry, my opinion remains that our industry saw it as all there was.
When money was easier to get, they did not play up the bigger potential.
They let C++ catch 'em by surprise, out of (pretty much) nowhere.

Let's go back to work; you are entitled to your opinion and Ito mine.

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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