Re: Adaforge?

[Micronian Coder <micronian2@gmail.com>]

Hi Patrick,

I like the points you have made and have felt the same about some them for a quite a while. A few I would like to comment on are :

[1] A private company seems to be the center of the Ada and profit has to be their goal 

   I really like AdaCore and if it wasn't for GNAT, I would never have gotten in to Ada. One of the arguments of Ada has been that it is very portable. I've raised some concern in the past with colleagues about long term projects being implemented in Java or C# because each of those are basically controlled by one company and keep changing too frequently (remember all those "deprecated" Java warnings). However, if it is perceived that AdaCore = Ada, then it would be less effective as an argument. In reality, there are still other compilers. However, it is a shame that most, namely Aonix (now Atego), DDC-I, Green Hills, Janus/Ada, are still stuck at Ada95 (note: it still is a very good language of course), so it can be perceive by others that Ada will be a dead end. Fortunately, Irvine Compiler Corp can now be included in the list of compilers that fully supports Ada2005. I hope they have success with their Ada2005 offering.


[2] highlighted a not-for-profit effort

This is good too. The AdaIC website has a more modern look, but content wise it basically looks like a PR page for AdaCore since almost all the news is related to that company.

An AdaForge page has to be more than that and it can be by focusing on what the community is doing. News about project from companies can still be included, but it shouldn't be the main content like AdaIC.

[3] Highlighted projects that were not mission critical/military
    Highlighted Ada's usefulness on multicore machines

   Definitely. Although Ada is great for the safety critical embedded area, it has to appear it is beyond that to gather a larger base. When I keep reading how Ada is mostly used for military and safety critical systems, I can't help but think that must put off a lot of people who may think Ada is not appropriate elsewhere are "boring".


On Tuesday, May 1, 2012 3:56:02 PM UTC-7, Patrick wrote:
> Hi  Riccardo
> 
> I strongly support your suggestion. I am not attacking Adacore or the efforts of others but there are several things that might be frightening off newcomers to the language and your proposal might really help offset this.
> 
> As someone new myself, I have been worried as to why:
> 
> -Many Ada sites have a circa 1995 look to the them
> 
> -Many of these sites talk about Ada 95 furthering the outdated fears
> 
> -A private company seems to be the centre of the Ada and profit has to 
> be their goal 
> 
> -Many of these sites have dead links
> 
> 
> If we had an AdaForge site that was/had:
> 
> -A modern look and feel
> -Highlighted projects that were not mission critical/military
> -Highlighted Ada's usefulness on multicore machines
> -highlighted a not-for-profit effort
> -highlighted projects that were mixed with other languages
> -highlight the open source compiler
> 
> 
> and linked to current resources like books, tutorials etc, it would dispel some of the fears. One thing that helped me overcome by early concerns was the fact that Ada is used in long term projects and projects just launched like the 787 plane. Even if all the Ada libraries die off the GNAT compiler should be maintained for quite some time, perhaps 20+ years ?
> 
> If we posted information like this on the home page it might help stop the FUD.
> 
> I don't consider myself much of a graphic designer but I would be happy to hack together a static site that could generate discussions about the look and feel of the site to come. Nothing would have to be accepted into the new site.
> 
> LuaForge also has a lot of projects in various states of usefulness too. They used Perl for their first LuaForge but it broke. Now they are using a Sputnik backed site:
> http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/
> 
> It's written in Lua. We might have to use another language to drive the site as Ada doesn't seem to have much of a following in the web space. Perhaps later we could redo it with an Ada backend later.
> 
> 
> Anyhow, thanks for bring this up! -Patrick