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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>
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Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:23:25 +0100
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On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 16:06 +0100, Markus E Leypold wrote:
> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> 
>  Since a lot of programming these days is general list
> manipulation, everyday jobs become painful. 

That lots of programming these days is list manipulation is a
popular misunderstanding I think. Witness the popularity
of what is known as Okasaki's Book. "forall", "exists",
remove-member, map(filter'access, items), etc. do not require
lists. Some of these operations don't even need traversal
(iteration, recursion, whatever you call it).
On the contrary, old Lisp style sets and maps have
always known to be as inefficient as O(n) can be.

As you have said yourself,

"the presence of
> lists and hashtables/dictionaries in those languages together with the
> absence of memory management is a factor in this popularity. 

It's not lists you manipulate when using hashtables/dictionaries.

>     But what is absolutely annoying, is, that the compatibility of
>     objects is determined by inheritance instead by the type
>     signature.

Compatibility of objects or of references to objects? What about
assignment?

I think interface types are helpful here.

>  The Java generics
> tutorial in I my eyes documents 2 things: (a) what has been really
> sorely missing from Java for 10 years and (b) that you can complement
> a type safe pascalish type system usefully with subtyping and
> parameterized types.

Why isn't Eiffel popular? :-)