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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham 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!v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? Date: 24 Jan 2007 02:32:39 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1169634759.626222.205410@v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com> References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169597572.530180.35780@h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.122.158.4 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1169634771 19984 127.0.0.1 (24 Jan 2007 10:32:51 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:32:51 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: <1169597572.530180.35780@h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com; posting-host=206.122.158.4; posting-account=CZAoAgwAAAD9ntJQ85OlWL0_Q5EFdzP_ Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8471 Date: 2007-01-24T02:32:39-08:00 List-Id: > > 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 NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!