Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>]

Adrian Hoe,

It is good to hear from an Ada user in Malaysia.

It is unfortunate that Malaysian Universities see themselves as sources
of training for technology fads. The story you present below tells me
that UTM is interested only in encouraging payments from students and
industry. It has no real interest in making Malaysia a premier software
education and development center.

The education I can imagine from UTM can be described using an old
phrase American immigrants used to describe the Platte River over
150 years ago: It is a mile wide and an inch deep. Another common
description was "Too thick to drink and too thin to plow." The first
saying indicates that the river is not nearly as impressive as it
may first appear. The second saying indicates that it has no
practical use.

I am amazed that the senior lecturer was unchallenged in his or her
statement about Ada being too old. I expect this is in comparison to
Java. This amounts to saying that a proven product is not as good as
an unproven product because the unproven product is newer. Such a
statement is pure nonesense. 

It is even more nonesensical when you realize that Java has very
few new language developments. It is simply a compilation of a lot
of language features from a lot of other languages. In fact, without
the standard Java API the language would be completely ignored.
It offers nothing new, and it offers all these old features with
very poor performance. 

I would have been tempted to ask the senior lecturer if he or she
was willing to fly in an airplane with avionics programmed in 
Java. 

Look at Java's thread model. It is seriously flawed. This is not just
my opinion. This is the opinion of the Java development team
themselves. The earliest Java thread model included methods stop()
and suspend(). After several years of use it was discovered that
those methods are so unsafe that they had to be deprecated in the
language. The use of each method would frequently result in 
deadlocks and race conditions. The major problem was not that those
methods were faulty, but that the thread model was designed such 
that those methods could not be properly fixed. The only option
left to the Java design team was to simply declare those methods
to be broken, and advise against their use.

Java tried one somewhat new idea for dealing with threads. That is
the concept of thread groups. The idea was that threads could be
associated with a group, allowing all the threads in a group to
be stopped or suspended at the same time. Now that the stop()
and suspend() methods are deprecated, there is no reason to use
thread groups. Thus, the one attempt at real invention in the
Java language was made redundant because the underlying thread
model was so poorly designed. 

Java was originally touted as the answer to client-side programming
in a networked environment using applets. Applets are java
applications running in a user's browser. For several years people
tried to make applets work. Some success was achieved. Then Java 2
was released, with its Java Foundation Classes including the Swing
gui components. Swing is supposed to be usable with applets as
well as regular applications. Unfortunately, Netscape and Internet
Explorer have chosen to ignore Sun's advice on HTML support for
Swing applets. Each has chosen its own approach to supporting
Swing, resulting in a most horrible nightmare of HTML code to
merely start a Swing applet. Even worse, there is no assurance that
Netscape and Internet Explorer will not change their own HTML
syntax to support Swing. The result is that Swing is essentially
unusable in applets. Most companies simply use dynamically created
HTML and CGI to perform client-side programming. Microsoft has
created Application Server Pages for this purpose. Sun followed up
with Java Server Pages.

Applets are simply another feature of Java found to be of little
practical use.

Java is an unstandardized language. Sun likes to call this a
de-facto standard. Sun has its own meaning for such a phrase.
It means that everyone is encouraged to use Java. The Java API
documentation is freely published on the web (even though the
API documentation contains some serious errors). Sun is free to
change the API documentation at any time. The thread example
above is a good example. Sun maintains complete control over
what Java is and is not.

Sun has started into formal international standardization of Java
no less than five times. Each time they have pulled out of the 
effort. It is not clear to me that Sun will ever cooperate with
a standardization of Java. 

Java is clearly not superior to Ada. Java is not even clearly
newer than Ada. Java is clearly more unstable and unsafe to use
than Ada.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA