Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Luke A. Guest wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 11:27:05 -0700, Robert Law wrote:
>>I want to use a language that meets the following criteria:
>>
>>1. It must be reliable.
>>2. It must be supported.
>>3. It must be usuable to develop applications in a graphical
>>environment.  Basically Motif, GTK, or KDE.

I believe Ada delivers on all three, but point #3 is
a bit of a weak point as I see it. But that aside,
I can say that after 15+ years of doing C, and later
C++ programming, I found myself pining for something
better. In the 80's, I did a few years in a PL/I
subset, which at the time felt "about right".  And
later, growing weary of C/C++, found myself wishing for
something similar. Ada was suggested and after taking
some time to learn it, I began to love it. It won't
be the right answer to everything (for example
Postscript fills its special role well), but I find
that it works rather well for most things.

I think it is great for Open Sourced projects where
hobby time is limited (especially for married folks
with children etc.), because of all of the static
and type checking done at compile time. I spend an
order of magnitude less time doing debugging. C
and C++ required the opposite experience: easy to
compile but many design flaws and mysterious bugs
to debug. Despite the 15+ years of experience of
learning where to be careful in C/C++, on a large
project you almost always end up hitting a strange
bug eventually that takes enormous time to solve
(corruption, memory leaks etc.) Memory tools etc.
help, but I find there is no substitute to the
compiler helping you out up front.

The Ada95 model force you also to reconsider the
coupling of program components, and elaboration
order. Many other languages are quite happy to
share many external (global) elements, and not
worry about elaboration order etc.

To sum up, Ada is great in my mind. Where I see
a weakness is making Ada packages portable to
many platforms (I don't think this is as easy
as it could be). I also think that since we
live predominantly in a C language O/S environment,
it gets tiresome if you have to write bindings
and/or interfaces to O/S interfaces (where no
Ada bindings exist). But this depends a lot
on the nature of the project. Many projects
may not have this difficulty.

However, on the balance sheet I would still
favour Ada for the time it saves me in design.
Most important to me: Ada95 brings joy back
to programming, since most of the time you
can write your programs with the application
design in mind. Another way to say this is
that you express your algorithm in terms that
a programmer would want to use.

C/C++/Java/C# However, force you to
work in terms of the implementation:
for example, mapping the application array
bounds to the natural language bounds (0 to
n-1 vs low_bound..high_bound).

If you love writing software, I think Ada
is the way to go. If you just want to get
the job done, YMMV.  If you are supporting
the end product, Ada may server you better
as well in the long run.

Anyway, that is just my $0.02 take on it.
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg