Re: Ada for 1st year students

[amado.alves@gmail.com]

> It is not only a GPS problem. Visual Studio, GPS tries to imitate, has it,
> Workbench as well (and totally unusable in addition). You need to create a
> project up front. But typically people start a project with one or two
> files and want to work on incrementally. Ada as a language allows this. GPR
> project files do not. (Kasakov)

Exactly! Greatly put.

> I like AdaGIDE's approach that a source file can be compiled immediately
> and the "project" (I mean the *.ago file) is created in the background.
> Later, as the project grows you can modify the project file.

Yes, that makes a world of difference (if these drafted projects file
are needed at all, or convenient, or better than environmental
variables, which I still don't think they are).

> BTW, I don't consider visual editing of project files as a strength. It
> does not work in GPS, it also does not in Visual Studio....

Yeah, visual programming only introduces a new form of spaggetti. I've
seen this happen. Visual "programmers" writing the (possibly) right
code on the wrong textbox of the wrong popdown menu of the wrong
window... WIMP programmers indeed. Visual spaggetti, the worse kind
there is. Bugs extremely hard to find. Takes months. That's the
bleeding edge technology of programming tools :-(

I am not teaching IDEs, or project management, or configuration
management. I am teaching algorithmics, and Ada. The visual noise and
extra work introduced by these Visual IDEs is simply unacceptable for
this purpose.