From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,a0be06fbc0dd71f1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!v4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "framefritti@gmail.com" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: The future of Ada is at risk Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:02:21 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <14c08a39-2111-40e3-a016-8763726ecb96@v4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> References: <20071229040639.f753f982.coolzone@it.dk> <13oe680qard6u2d@corp.supernews.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 158.110.28.116 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1200056542 27026 127.0.0.1 (11 Jan 2008 13:02:22 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:02:22 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: v4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=158.110.28.116; posting-account=9fwclgkAAAD6oQ5usUYhee1l39geVY99 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.11 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030708,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:19313 Date: 2008-01-11T05:02:21-08:00 List-Id: 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)