Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[mg@asp.camb.inmet.com (Mitch Gart)]

Michael Feldman (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu) wrote:

: OK, Alsys excepted. I still think it's pretty much the case that even
: Alsys saw its competition as coming from other Ada companies, not other
: languages. Conceivably they did not feel this way (I wasn't on the
: inside of course), but to an outsider, they surely acted like it.
: You may simply have been too close to those companies (at that time)
: to see them as an outsider did. "Where you stand depends on where you sit."

Unfair.  During the 80's Alsys did a lot of promotions, conferences,
ads, and so on trying to get Ada to catch on with non-defense users.
They developed compilers for environments that were not seen at the 
time as being big DOD markets, such as the PC and IBM mainframes.
Once they even paid for a focus group where they got a bunch of IS
managers in and asked them why they use the languages they do,
what features they need from a computer language, what it would 
take to get them to change languages, that sort of thing.

With hindsight, these efforts could possibly be criticized as being 
unsuccessful, or incorrectly implemented for one reason or another.  
But you can't say they didn't try, because they really did invest lots 
of time and money over several years.  

	Mitch Gart