Re: Ada 2005 vs Ada 2012

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 5:24:59 AM UTC-6, Peter C. Chapin wrote:
> On 03/27/2013 04:48 AM, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> 
> > Merging these two together even in the form of two-volume book, but with a single title "Programming in Ada 2012" could look better on bookshelves as the message to prospective buyer is different. Who's going to buy "Programming in Ada 2005" today? For today's fresh graduates, for example, year 2005 is a distant history, long before they went to university. Stone age, that is. How is that going to compete with all the buzzwords that they are exposed to nowadays?
> >
> > Even if it is barely a marketing issue, it should not be neglected. Note that the direct competition, C++11, is starting to hit the shelves at bookstores. Ada2012 looks much better than Ada2005 in this context, so I'd argue for a title refresh, even if it could be just a cover replacement.
> 
> 
> I suspect John is aware of these issues. I agree that a new title is 
> sexier and that's important. Personally I have to believe it would be 
> possible to trim back the current book enough to make space for the new 
> Ada 2012 material. It's not like Ada 2012 increased the size of the 
> language by 50%.
> 
> That said, one of the attractions of the Barnes book is its 
> comprehensiveness. Trimming back material would potentially take away 
> from that.

I agree with you about the possibility of trimming things back. The difficulty there, as I see it, is that several separate-but-related concepts would have to be overlayed and to do that he'd need to rearrange the order of introduction of certain concepts. {Ex. introducing packages, subprograms, and records very early so that parametrization/genericicity may be introduced on all of them at once.}

There could be advantages to showing such similar concepts together, but it seems like it would be very hard to do it well so those advantages played to rather than being accidentally stumbled upon by certain readers.