Re: The future of Ada is at risk

["framefritti@gmail.com" <framefritti@gmail.com>]

Phaedrus wrote:

>
> 1.  It's relatively intimidating to learn.
>
>(snip)
>
> 3.  Perception/PR
>
>

Some impressions that I got speaking with people in my environment:
when I say that I felt
(professionally, of course) in love with Ada, most of the times I get
remarks such "Does it still exist?",
"It is too huge!", "Why not an object-oriented language?", "The world
advances and you go back..."
(the last one is the litteral translation of what a coworker of mine
said).  Summarizing, my impression
is that most of non-Ada people think that Ada is too old or too
complex for general use.

About the difficulty of learning Ada: I admit it is not BASIC, but my
experience (with students carrying
out their final project) is that the average student requires few
weeks to learn enough Ada to start
working.  I believe that "intimidating" is the right word, since maybe
most people _believe_ that
learning Ada is too difficult a task.

I think I am going to put my 0.05 Euro in the Ada PR department by
talking about Ada at the next
local Linux Group meeting.

>
> 4. Ease of deployment
>
> It really is quicker and easier to create small C apps for Windows (The
                                                          ^^^^^

I believe that "small" is the key-word here. Although I am an Ada-guy,
Ada is not the only
programming language that I use: I use matlab (for numerical
experiment),
Ruby (for fast-and-dirty and/or medium-small applications) and PHP
(when I have to :-).

My impression is that the "strict" nature of Ada gets in the way when
you try do develop small
applications.  Sure, strictness is what makes your program safer and I
believe that it is
really important with large pieces of software, but when you want to
write a medium-small application
(say, a "keyring" for passwords with some GUI),  the duck-typing of
Ruby (or whatever language
you like...) is more flexible and easier to use.

Can/should we make Ada easier to use for small applications?   I do
not know... my impression
is that if you want something which is really safe you pay it with a
loss of flexibility
(like a stability/maneuverability tradeoff in planes)

Actually, I agree that a big step in ease of deployment would be the
availability of a
large number of good libraries (which, incidentally, is a big
advantage of languages like Perl,
Ruby, Python...).

Maybe if Ada was more used in the open source community.... (another
reason for  introducing Ada at the next meeting)