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
> > **************************************
> >
>