Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[agate!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl. gov!taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil!shimeall@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (timothy shimeall)]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Jun2233244@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory 
Aharonian) writes:
>   Simple.  Drop the Ada Mandate.  It is an artificial distortion of the
>marketplace that has sheltered Ada from competition with other languages.
>Compiler prices are uncompetitive with those of other languages, no one
>is producing the Ada add-on libraries so useful for development in other
>worlds because there is no market.  Not only is the Ada Mandate bad
>economics, but it is also bad policy, as evidence by the ongoing defections
>from following by many inside the armed forces.  In short, because of Ada
>policies and not because of the language itself, Ada is uncompetitive and
>not attractive enough to be more widely used.

However, the Ada Mandate has also allowed the armed forces to drop
maintenance of litterally thousands of special-purpose compilers,
created during the 60s and 70s to support development of single
projects.  It has also allowed a large decrease in
maintenance-programmer-training costs...  In short, the ORIGINAL
purpose of the Ada Mandate, to allow DoD to move to a small subset
of languages (Ada, and selected others where economically necessary)
from the pre-Ada hugely multilingual days.

Tell us Greg: If the Ada Mandate is dropped, how is DoD to retain
the small-language-set benefits?  Factor into your calculations that
there IS NO STANDARD for many commonly-used languages (incl. C and C++)
, and, in fact, there are large portability problems for non-trivial 
non-Ada-based applications across even rather similar environments.  
(Right now, I'm trying to port the Aegis project-control system from 
Sun to Iris, and the bug-chasing is annoyingly complex...)
Given the DoD radical maintenance requirements, this may be a 
serious concern.

The fact of the matter is that Ada is MEANT to be a niche language.
The language sponsors, DoD, don't much care (except where it 
impacts their costs) if Ada EVER is a huge commercial success.
Even as it is today, it is VERY useful in the DoD context.
				Tim
Disclaimer: The preceding is NOT an official statement for any
governmental or nongovernmental organization.  It is a personal
opinion of the author.