Re: Newcomers to

[HerrDoktor <herrdoktor@fumanchu.com>]

I became interested in Ada a few years ago. I used Modula 2 in the 80s, 
made and sold a few toolbox library even, then somehow I got on the 
C/C++ path and was drifting with the flow over the years.

More and more I got the feeling that this development was going the 
wrong way, everything there was becoming more and more complicated and I 
started to remember the good old days, when we made powerful programs 
without having to deal with multiple levels of templates and multiple 
inheritance and whatever makes live hell these days, and I started to 
look around if there wasn't a language that was a bit more like Modula 2 
and still actively supported by compiler vendors.

I am also not a big fan of OO techniques and part of what got me 
interested in Ada is that it is easier or perhaps more natural there, to 
restrict OO programming to the absolute minimum and program more in an 
imperative style which, in my view is more natural to the environment 
we're working with (a machine with memory that contains instructions and 
data and an ALU). I realize that my views are contrary to mostly all 
language that are en vogue today, but I think programming can become 
less complicated by looking backwards, not "forward" and using proven 
techniques like Structured Development.

Anyhow, I was able to write a fairly nice debug monitor system in Ada 
after reading Barne's book and I was relatively impressed that Ada 
enabled me to write a non trivial program pretty easy as a newcommer to 
the language. Also, contrary to my experiences in C++, the program was 
stable pretty soon without crashing with new errors long after I 
finished it, which also impressed me.

Right now, I am stuck with C++ but I intend to use Ada more and more for 
tools if possible. My next project will be a simple Text User Interface. 
I used Ncurses for my monitor program, but I don't like the fact that it 
is pretty complex to compile on Windows with MinGW and GPS installed 
parallel. Also, it seems a bit slow to me with regard to output, so I 
thought this would be a good pet project to take the next step with Ada.



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