Re: If not Ada, what else...

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

> Since then only Ada fitted the bill of readable code and reliability on top of that. (I've been looking at modula back then initially.)

Agreed

> Now with this discussion regarding D and I even started looking at Go and I'm puzzled.

Go is Oberon with C syntax and some week concurrency features, not worthy of much time. Is also seriously broken for anything more than script size software.

>  I've read there that some people consider D dead. 

I was not advocating D, only pointing out the next best thing to Ada, but by wide margin. To be precise talking about D2, D is dead and was replaced by D2.

> Moreover, I'm not sure I can use D on all the platform I'm aiming at.

Then likely you can't use Ada on them either. D has 3 backend options, GCC, LLVM and its own. Ada only has GCC... In fact my complaint is that I can't use Ada on the most important mobile and desktop platforms because it is married to GCC.

>  In a nutshell I need an environment that helps me writing code right from inception (the range type example is one of these things I like in Ada), supports reliable concurrent programming, can read XML (without needing DOM), interface to Oracle and other RDBMS, and compile native code for Linux, AIX, Solaris and others ....
> I'm not sure D fits the complete bill and believe Ada still exceeds.

D actually does everything you listed just as well or better. Ada as a language is far stronger for sure (I am one of its biggest advocates), but Ada suffers from few bindings, foolish license games, much weaker standard runtime library, no package management system with automatic builds like dub (although Gnoga now has the start of one and will be in the next 1.2 release in the coming months), Ada has a much more limited set of targets, etc.

I could probably go on, but I'm an Ada advocate and right now doing what I can to fix the holes in Ada from the shortsighted lack of almost all investment in real R&D for Ada's environment by the few vendors it has had/has, mostly because the niche market they cater(ed) to are mostly hardware oriented with little need for "environment".

If you use Ada today it is mostly because of the language's strengths that were already in Ada 83 not because Ada (yet) offers a better or wider set of features to other languages and development environments (It simply does not, but could and should have especially given the age and amounts of money involved in the contracts of yesteryear).

David Botton