Ada is popular after all

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Remember my tirade [1] about how some languages are the "zen masters"
of programming? I quickly looked at the results of Debian's Popularity
Contest [2], which ranks packages in Debian according to their
popularity. (This ranking helps choose which CD-ROM or DVD-ROM each
package ships on. There are currently 23 CD-ROMs or 3 DVD-ROMs for
i386 alone.)

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/27adfc53e2cb4ac1
[2] http://popcon.debian.org

I only looked at the "zen master" languages and at the "votes" column
in the popularity contest results. Here is what I found:

Language Package      Votes
---------------------------
Ada      gnat         98
Pascal   fp-compiler  65
Pascal   gpc          55
Eiffel   smarteiffel  20
Modula-2 m2c          4
Oberon   oo2c         1

Granted, the two Pascal compilers combined beat gnat, but just look at
the graph on [3] for the evolution since 2004. Something's happening.

[3] http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?
packages=fp-compiler%2C+gnat%2C
+gpc&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1

Another thing that makes Ada trendy nowadays is the enduring series of
articles by Yves Bailly in GNU/Linux Magazine France. The December
issue contains article #14 in the series, ending with a mention of
"the next article"...

--
Ludovic Brenta.