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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:
From:
"W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 8 Nov 1996 08:31:28 EST
In-Reply-To:
<[log in to unmask]>; from "Michael Feldman" at Nov 7, 96 5:57 pm
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Reply-To:
"W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" <[log in to unmask]>
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:> At this point, I think we should stop flaming, till the full report

Although I didn't like what happened either, the resulting exchange (which
I participated in--mea culpa) reminds me of an incident in the U.S. in
the 1850s.  Among the pro-slavery people was a judge.  Other pro-slavery
people felt that he was not taking sufficient advantage of his position to
help the cause (i.e., not throwing enough abolitionists in jail) so they
tarred and feathered him and rode him around town on a rail.

Back to the charter of the list....

Some suggestions for current Ada marketing efforts:

Perhaps it doesn't help our pitch for Ada's portability to offer Web pages
that only work with the popular browsers.  I'm not suggesting applets be
abandoned (though we should recognize many people still can't use them).
Rather I refer to sophisticated tables and graphics which many browsers
STILL can't handle.  (The one my company provides on this machine will
often not display a table at all if it has links in it.)  Might not some
victim think, "They talk about portability, but they obviously don't
really think it's important."

I'm deliberately not giving names--if the shoe fits......

We talk about quality, lack of defects, reliability, etc. but a few of our
Web pages are full of spelling errors, formatting glitches, and even some
bad grammar.  (Fortunately VERY few.)  We're human, we make mistakes, yes.
But let's at least proof-read our marketing materials.

I haven't yet looked at the Ada-Belgium pages that Wasserman allegedly
showed contempt for.  But I have seen (again VERY few) Ada pages that were
(to be tactful) inaccurate.  Some exaggeration is expected in advertising,
but too much is counter-productive.  It may be that some of our "success
stories" even can hurt Ada.  I refer to the proud announcement of how Ada
worked wonders for Company X on Project Y when a simple phone call to
Company X reveals that they abandoned Ada to use C & C++ or FORTRAN.

(I made the phone calls, and those were the language groups claimed by
two such companies--it's not a hypothetical example.)

To beat a dead horse, one more:  One paper was very well-written (from an
writer-editor-publisher's point of view), had careful, thoughtful ranking
and weighting of various criteria applied to various languages.  But it
was still obvious that the weights of the criteria were (consciously or
not) designed to make Ada the winner.

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W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)                                Office: 219-429-4923
Hughes Defense Communications (MS 10-40)                 Home: 219-471-7206
Fort Wayne,  IN   46808                  (Unix): [log in to unmask]
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