Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com]

> > 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.
[...]

Probably one hurdle for Ada is that the "Ada guys", self-called "we,
the true Software Engineers" want to keep "their" language for
themselves and discourage the "young hackers" even to take a look at it
when they mature... :-)
You are missing some aspects:
- a hacking teenager (I was one) is able to evolve and see that the
some previous "hacks" stop quicker working because there too much
intrication between I/O, GUI, system, libraries, or the code was too
cryptic
- it is possible to hack in Ada; no surprise, such programs are the
only that compile and run after 10 years sleep, on a new environment;
you are happy there was no conditional compilation in the source,
whereas other hacks in another language stop a compiler at line 2 or
3...
- not having hacked in the young age does not help to program better.
If you look at the code of whatever time you see that untalented people
program exactly as poorly whatever they did in their young age. You see
these same huge chunks of copy-paste style instruction blocks in old
Fortran code or recent code of whatever language, with a mix of
interactive/non-interactive, mix of abstraction levels; these people
find that a subprogram is a kind of magic, so they prefer to activate
the copy-paste machine, which they think is safer...
If you succeeded in your effort of generation split (drawing Ada on the
"old" side, then into the coffin), yes, there would be trouble for that
language...
______________________________________________________________
Gautier         -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/index.htm
Ada programming -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

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