Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com>]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> 
> Some of the alternatives to Ada are more popular.  Some misguided
> managers have mistaken popularity for quality and several DoD
> contractors have made the error of forsaking Ada in favor of inferior
> technologies such as C++.  Does this mean Ada is dead in those
> organizations?   Not really.
> 
> As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are, they
> reconsider the benefits of Ada.   C++, for example, turns out to be just
> another pretty face. Even as early as the wedding night, scrubbed of its
> makeup, shed of its adornments, the C++ honeymoon can quite suddenly
> be over.  Sadly, we continue to see some make decisions for form over
> substance.
> 

To contuinue the analogy, it sounds pretty much like a rant of a left
woman about how foolish her guy was to marry another woman, because her
breasts are fake and most of her face is a surgeons's talent. Those
rants never bring the guy back, because if he's left then it was for a
good reason. He probably did not like her enough with all her real good
amenities.

> But "Ada is DEAD?"  Hardly.  It appears that a prodigality of resources
> dedicated to opposing technologies was important so those deluded souls
> could understand the importance of what they had in the first place.
> Now they need to get over buyer's remorse and get back to the solid
> capabilities available in Ada.
> 

Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
code) and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.
Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
(even C++ is too high). And yet it is not as portable and distributable
as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
like Pascal and that turns me down immediately. Of course, those are
just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
don't say that those opinions are absolute right.

In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
until a) and b) is done.

- Igor