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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
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"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 8 Oct 1998 22:20:00 -0700
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Subject:
From:
Gene Ouye <[log in to unmask]>
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Could we stop bashing Ron just because he happens to work for Aonix and once
was familiar with Ada?  It's unreasonable to expect that every person who
works for any reasonably sized company knows every detail of every
technology of every product with which the company is affiliated.

Would you seriously expect the random TRW employee working on a government
embedded software project to know about credit reporting, or auto parts, or
cap screws?  Or the random GE employee making lightbulbs to know how to
build jet engines?

Ron said his list of cons was things he had "heard", and he said his direct
experience with Ada was pretty old.  Maybe things showed up in a different
order on your computers, but when I got these emails, the only answers to
the original questions were jokes about the spelling of ADA, and one email
saying Ada wasn't used much because it wasn't popular.

Geez, he was just trying to help.  Nobody else had given any answers of
substance, and he caveat'ed his answers so that people with more
experience/knowledge/etc could chime in with something better when they got
around to it.

This is from the Team-Ada FAQ:

        What is Team Ada about?

        Team Ada is a highly informal organisation dedicated to telling
        the world about the advantages of the Ada programming language.
        Faced with a large amount of ignorance and misinformation about
        Ada, Teamers respond by demonstrating it to others, and educating
        them about its strengths and weaknesses. Teamers are all volunteers
        with a genuine enthusiasm for Ada that translates itself into a
        wish to spread that enthusiasm to others.

Ron definitely was trying to "spread enthusiasm", and maybe he took the
third and fourth lines in the above description a little too literally,
"demonstrating a large amount of ignorance and misinformation about Ada".
;-)

Let's not kill him for trying to help.

Gene Ouye <[log in to unmask]>

Apex Ada NT Product Manager                     phone:  408-863-5054
Rational Software Corporation           cell:   650-465-2541
18880 Homestead Road                            fax:    408-863-5075
Cupertino, CA 95014                             email:  [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 1998 8:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ADAs pros and cons.


To: Ron
From: Bob Leif
Aonix Customer

Unfortunately, you have again demonstrated the major problem with Ada, which
is marketing and lack of communication. I hope that the Aonix Sales and
Marketing Department will hone their communication skills by explaining the
many advantages of their product to you.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Thursday, October 08, 1998 11:36 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: ADAs pros and cons.
>
>
> On a more serious note.
>
> Some of the bad points that I've heard about Ada have been:
>
> 1)  The time it takes to compile.  Granted, the Ada compilers
>     generally take longer to compile programs than C/C++
>     compilers (for the same amount of code) but they also do
>     alot more work (there are more compile time errors in Ada
>     than C/C++ and few, in my experience, runtime errors.)
>
> 2)  The language dosen't "support" (take your pick)  as part of
>     the language.  These are normally binary, pointer, or memory
>     operations that are machine specific and fall into the
>     infamous 'Chapter 13'.  Much of this was originally supposed
>     to be addressed in the Ada 9x specification.  I've been out
>     of the Ada programming area for the last few years so I can't
>     say if they have or haven't addressed these issues.
>
> 3)  The language is too large, or too verbose, etc.  This was always
>     (IMHO) a fictional argument.  The language is so much like Pascal,
>     so regular, and so well documented that what seems like it should
>     work normally does work and if it works one way doing one thing it
>     works the same way doing something else.
>
> 4)  The cost of the compilers is too high is another complaint.  This
>     gone away do to the efforts of some very nice people writing several
>     freeware/public domain Ada compilers and environments.
>
> One of the major reasons that I see preventing the use of Ada by
> companies is their desire to hire people off the street and put them
> directly to work programming (note I don't use the term 'Software
> Engineering' here...).  The people I ran into at IBM that had 15 to 20
> years there had all been sent to company schools that took 6 to 9 months
> (before they went to their assigned jobs.)  When I started I had 2 half
> days of inprocessing and started working on their systems the first day.
>
> The companies I've worked for (or interviewed with since then) have all
> wanted you to have the skills before starting to work for them and none
> seemed willing to invest the time and money for training their people.
> This is just my experience, I hope other people have had different
> experiences.
>
> Ron
>
>
> > From [log in to unmask] Thu Oct  8 08:49 PDT 1998
> >
> > Dear team members,
> >
> > I am giving a short lecture to fellow students on ADA and its
> uses.  I have
> > a fair amount of literature on its history , what it looks
> like, how to use
> > it, and its advantages over certain other languages (which I
> won't mention
> > here).  But like most people, I believe everything has its pros
> and cons,
> > its good and bad points.  I cant really find much in the way to say bad
> > about it, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there which would say thetas
> > because it doesn't have any bad points, but equally there may
> be a few who
> > look at it in a broader view, and may be able to give me their
> opinions on
> > what is its bad points, or why people aren't using it.  It is
> just a lack
> > of training, lack of decent advertising, cost of manpower involved?
> >
> > Please and sensible answers or opinions greatly appreciated.
> > Thanks in advance
> >
> > Neil Evans
> >
> >
> >
> > *************************************
> >      Neil Evans
> >      Z2 Room 2 (The Z sheds)
> >      Horwood Hall
> >      Keele University
> >      N Staffs
> >
> >      [log in to unmask]
> >      01782 246853
> > **************************************
> >
>

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