From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: JPWoodruff@gmail.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? Date: 23 Jan 2007 16:12:52 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1169597572.530180.35780@h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com> References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.4.21.236 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1169597579 27888 127.0.0.1 (24 Jan 2007 00:12:59 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:12:59 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=24.4.21.236; posting-account=fJYhjA0AAADq5HS0Ommw0DzKlat-I76I Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8454 Date: 2007-01-23T16:12:52-08:00 List-Id: On Jan 22, 9:53 pm, artifact....@googlemail.com wrote: > > My question is: how come Ada isn't more popular? > I have another hypothesis that involves the way many programmers got started at a young age. For some decades, classes of smart young teenagers have had easy access to computers and amateur tools, and have honed their skills at what most of them called "hacking". They learned to reason in low levels of abstraction. They spent a lot of time in thread-of-execution debugging. I think that software engineers who started their understanding in that paradigm are a hard sell for Ada. They do have techniques that work and there are plentiful examples of their success, but we Ada guys prefer something different. There are other ways to come to the software engineering mindset. One way is to want to write interesting essays in the form of executable programs. Ada is one of the finest tools for this task - at least as far as our kind of program is concerned. I submit Richard as an example - he writes whereof he knows. A few of the other deponents on this conversation are no slouches either. John