Re: More Ganssle on Ada

[Micronian Coder <micronian2@gmail.com>]

When I read the article, I too felt very disappointed that Adacore gave the impression that unless you do safety critical code, you don't need to consider Ada, which is absolutely silly. If you want to avoid bugs in your software and have good maintainability, you should at least consider using Ada to help(not guaranty!) you reach that goal. This is especially true for many who don't have the sophisticated environment that the article recommends, such as small businesses, hobbyists, and students. Perhaps the message should have been "Ada is ideal for safety critical applications, but it's properties can benefit other domains where the developer wants to avoid bugs in their software and are concerned with maintainability." 


On Saturday, January 19, 2013 3:29:30 PM UTC-8, Patrick wrote:
> I am not trying to make comments about what projects Adacore or their customers are involved in. What I am infuriated about is how Adore is representing the language as a whole.
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> Let's delve further into the comment about not using Ada for a telephone application. What language comes to mind with such an application. Erlang. Hold this thought.....
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> CouchDB's primary creator made a courageous decision to rewrite his c++ application in Erlang.  Now imagine that Erickson made a statement earlier that Erlang should not be used for databases applications. Would he still have had the confidence to try?
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> Now the fear, uncertainty and doubt(FUD) floating around with Erlang right now is that it does not scale as advertised and it's concurrency model is not so great.
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> I have no idea if this is true but let's just say there was a project manager that did and that he/she went out shopping for another language. They would want a language that was had facilities for building high performance, high reliability and massively concurrent applications, sound like a language we know ?????
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> Only they read that Adacore says Ada is not a good match for this so they move on to the next language.
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> So when I started out with Ada about 14 months ago I had many assumptions that have been corrected. I thought that since it's part of GCC that I could use it for embedded design and target all the chips GCC supports. Now I understand how complex a job it is to write a runtime and even though I am disappointed it can't really be used for embedded design(as in baremetal on ARM) I forgave Adacore. They have a business to run and if writing runtimes for lots of targets is not in their best interest, they can't do it.
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> Later on I discovered that they re-licensed a large number of libraries GMGPL to GPL for non-paying customers. This makes it very hard for a small business to use them in a for profit applications and surely this was their intention but again I forgave them, it must have been in their best interest.
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> However now that I have seen this article and can see them sawing at the branch they are sitting on, I have no idea what the top brass is thinking. It's very alarming.