Re: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

[Vladimir G Ivanovic <address@hidden>]

"PG" == Paul Graham <paulgraham@yahoo.com> writes:

  PG> Remember Ada and C?  As I heard it, the DoD required all
  PG> their software to be written in Ada, and you had to get
  PG> an exemption to use anything else.  But the best hackers 
  PG> insisted on using C, and the DoD had to grant so many 
  PG> exemptions that Ada soon became a dead letter.

I'm more inclined to ascribe Ada failure to catch on as due to the lack
of a usable free implementation. I had one of the first freely available
Ada compilers. It was written in SETL. Talk about painful. BTW, the
viral marketing effect is maximized when source is available because
then people port it to all sorts of platforms.

      [...] 
  PG> Something similar happened with the Porsche 911. It was basically
  PG> a racing car. The serious car people loved it. The dufuses noticed
  PG> this and so they wanted 911s too, which was a problem because the
  PG> car had major oversteer. A lot of wannabees got killed as a
  PG> result.

Ahh, yes, Weissach's trailing throttle oversteer. Just never lift up. ;-)

--- Vladimir

Vladimir G. Ivanovic                        http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St.                                         vladimir@acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447                                 +1 650 678 8014