Re: Choose Ada flyer

[Paul Whittington <paul@grep.net>]

I use and love emacs, and its not much use when what you need is a
WYSIWYG visual GUI development environment.

Matthew Heaney wrote:
> 
> Paul Whittington <paul@grep.net> writes:
> 
> > I don't know exactly what the purpose of this material is, but it leaves
> > me with the impression that Ada is the right choice for large or safety
> > critical applications.
> >
> > It seems to me that the majority of software being written today falls
> > into the non-safety critical category, and the sponsors/developers do
> > not identify what they're doing as a "large" project.
> >
> > IMHO, any software worth writing is large enough to warrant the use of
> > Ada.
> >
> > What I would want to know is
> >
> > - Is there an Ada Delphi or Visual Basic like environment that supports
> >   the development of desktop GUI MIS-type applications?  Does it support
> >   a platform portable GUI like Tcl/Tk or JFC?
> >
> > - Are there Ada based tools that support enterprise level development?
> >   CORBA, COM, DCOM, application servers, SQL database servers, LDAP,
> >   and legacy system integration?
> >
> > - What about WWW deployment?  Do tools exist to support the development
> >   of thin client network applications implemented as WWW server
> >   extensions?  What platforms and servers?
> >
> > - Do these tools come with batteries included, or do I have to have
> >   gurus on my team to integrate all sorts of technologies together to
> >   get a useful development tool set?
> >
> > - How about third-party component/tools/utilities vendors?  Where do I
> >   go when I need to add fax, paging or report generation capabilities
> >   to my application?
> >
> > - How many vendors are there for these kinds of tools, and are they
> >   likely to be around in five years?
> >
> > Help me out here folks.  I love Ada.  From a language viewpoint there's
> > no better language than Ada.  From a compiler/IDE, third-party support,
> > vendor stability viewpoint I CAN'T CHOOSE Ada!
> >
> > The closest thing I've found is Delphi.
> 
> I don't have much to say about developing GUIs with Ada, but if you want
> an Ada development environment, then what's wrong with emacs?
> 
> Do programmers who don't use emacs think that emacs is just an editor?