Re: What is wrong with Ada?

[Jason King <jhking@airmail.net>]

I'm an MIS guy not a CS guy and this is my take.
If I have a business task to accomplish I'm looking for the tool or set 
of tools that will get my task accomplished quickly and the solution be 
maintainable.
We don't use c/c++ at our shop because its difficult to get the task 
accomplished quickly so we look to other tools.  As we survey the 
landscape we see vb, delphi, ada, java etc.
Initially ada looks very attractive because we're an Oracle shop and 
pl/sql (the stored procedure/trigger language inside the Oracle db) is 
based on ada-83.  Then we look for database access, tools to build 
client guis and tools to build web applications.  The tools available 
are substantially inferior in number and outside documentation to the 
ones available for java.  Then the bosses look around to see how hard it 
is to hire new people for the shop as our client list expands.  There 
aren't a whole bunch of ada developers out there but there are schools 
on several continents churning out armies of java developers.   Maybe 
the one ada developer is more productive than 1.5 or even two java 
developers but when we have to overcome the lack of tools + the lack of 
developers that makes us look other places.
In a world where we could search Amazon and find as many ada books as 
java books or get as many cvs with ada experience as java experience 
then ada would be an obvious choice.  In the world as it exists the 
availability of support materials and experienced developers outweighs 
the technical merits of ada.
martinbishop wrote:
> I've never been scared of "non mainstream" languages, but I was
> wondering, what is wrong with Ada?  Why don't more people use it?
> What
> do most people think of it?  To me, it seems like a nice, concise, and
> safe language, but I haven't used it yet.
>