Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Marin David Condic wrote:
> steve_H <nma124@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:8db3d6c8.0212091445.12594821@posting.google.com...
...
>>The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada
>>support,
>>where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
>>installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
>>and all the packages are there.
> 
> If you can only think of one way to solve a problem, you have not thought
> about it long enough. :-)

The other thing is that even when gcc fully includes Ada (gnat), the
packages/libraries may not necessarily be there (although there is a
greater chance of it now).

The problem is that when the user is shrink wrap
installing Linux for example, and asked whether or not it wants the
Ada packages or not, may look at the disk space requirement and say
"I don't need it". Over time, I would hope of course that people will
say instead "but I might need it to compile other Open Sourced
components". Disk space is getting cheaper, and as a result, maybe
that will even cease to be an option ;-)

> I will grant you that if Ada were completely integrated into gcc so that
> when you got it, it just plain worked right out of the box, that this would
> help encourage use of Ada. I've stated here in the past similar things about
> development kits. Sure, there are nice tools out there for Ada, but you've
> got to go out on the net and get X and Y and Z all from different sources
> and cobble them together into a patchwork of development tools and then,
> maybe, you've got equivalent capabilities to what people might get right out
> of the box from MSVC++ or Sun-Java. But that makes it *hard* and not very
> pretty. Any level of difficulty starts discouraging the average user and
> pointing them down the path of least resistance.

This is still a problem IMHO with Ada. I think the adapower site could
be better organized and more complete in this regard. But I don't like
to complain unless I can volunteer ;-)  Too much seems spread all over
the net (and I am guilty of this myself).  What adapower cannot host,
should perhaps have links to other Ada sites at least. I know that some
of this is there, but it seems rather incomplete.

> People I know who don't have some sort of knee-jerk, anti-Ada response will
> often admit that the language has many superior qualities, but that they
> can't/won't use it to develop their products because other languages give
> them some significan leverage they just can't get with the average Ada
> compiler. It may be a tough nut to crack, but if it isn't cracked, Ada will
> forever be an interesting "also ran" language.

There needs to be more "general purpose" quality bindings written. Some
of this is happening now that GNAT has been available, but like XFree86,
this effort takes time. It may be a pipe dream, but I still believe
in the possibility that we could see an Ada renaissance some day. As
pyramids of software are written, at some point, people are going to
start demanding that better quality foundations exist from which to
start building.

> Yes, the college kids who hack things together in the free software world
> are going to make a contribution to the popularity of the language. Its just
> that somewhere along the line, Ada has to find a way to pay the freight. 

It needs to exist in the workplace as an option. I can count on one
hand, then # of developers that are favourable to it in my career
circle. Young people need to start coming up from the ranks asking
to use it in projects.

> It
> has to have some amount of commercial success behind it or nobody is there
> to pay the bills. When a student graduates from college will he go to work
> for some company developing software and do it free of charge just for the
> fun of it? Well compiler vendors are companies too and they've got to pay
> those graduates something, don't they? So they'd better have some market for
> their wares besides college-kid-hackers or they won't have much of a
> business to support further development of tools for the language.

Part of the trouble is that many professors are selling "Java". In
part I can't blame them, for they need to prepare people for the
practicle realities of commercial development. OTOH, Ada is a much
better tool, assuming that the necessary library framework is there.

But IMHO, the library framework is not really there. AFAIK, even
Oracle has dropped support of the embedded Ada SQL precompiler. For
other databases, there exists no support at all for Ada. For my
own needs, I needed to write a better PostgreSQL binding (see
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg/software.html for APQ). The problem
is that not everyone has time to write new bindings (nor can
everyone do a good job of it). We have GtkAda, but it is not a
perfect solution yet (its difficult to compile on some platforms,
and may not be fully supported from a commercial requirements
perspective). So I think a better "commercial support" set of
packages and libraries is needed for more general purpose use.
Ada's standard packages are still rather primitive for daily
use in a general purpose environment (just look at Ada.Calendar
for example -- you cannot determine the day of the week from
the API given).

> Ground-up popularity is certainly important. Kids coming out of college who
> know Ada and are impressed by it and want to use it will help make it
> popular. Part-time hackers putting together free software will help it too.
> But don't underestimate the value of being able to go to corporate America
> and tell them "I can get you to market in 50% of the time with 4x fewer
> defects..." If that sale gets made, that will be what pays the bills to
> enable the students and hackers to go off and have some fun.
> 
> MDC

One other way Ada could become more popular, is to have an O/S
based upon it (the O/S would need to become popular of course).
In this way, the Ada API would be more natural,
and C programs (for example) would have to write their own bindings
to the Ada APIs. This would tend to encourage Ada source code ;-)

However, this is not likely to happen any time soon, because too
much has been written and expected (like Xlib, XFree86 etc.) that
is now written in C.

The ironic thing is that it might happen that our kids or grandkids
may be the ones that finally recognize Ada for what it is. It is
like some scientists and their discoveries -- they are never
really appreciated in their own lifetimes.
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg