Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Marin David Condic wrote:
> Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in message
> news:3DF628C4.7090607@cogeco.ca...
...
>>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.
> 
> It wouldn't hurt to have an Ada OS, but that's a really big project. If
> there were a way to get some funding to build one, that might get the ball
> rolling. After all, that's how Gnat got its start - and Gnat did a lot to
> make Ada more popular by providing an accessible compiler for the masses.
> 
> Bindings, I'm not so sure about. That can get into tricky issues. But at
> least a nice, big, juicy library of some general purpose code might start
> offering lots of leverage. Containers at minimum. Probably some nice math
> and statistics packages. Maybe some text processing facilities (like XML?)
> All that sort of thing would be relatively straightforward to build and make
> portable. A reference implementation that was agreed upon by most of the
> vendors would do the trick and it would create lots of leverage for the
> developer.

But consider the challenges of a Windows programmer that wants to write his
application in Ada:

  - A user interface beyond tty (console) mode is required (text or GUI)
  - Database access is required (very few serious applications can do
    without this).
  - O/S interfaces (e.g. printing and registry)
  - Network APIs

Right away the user has a 3 or 4-way struggle, with the first being the
user interface (GtkAda, CLAW, GWindows, or a
binding to curses?) Should the app be portable to Linux? This reduces
the choices still further.

What Ada database support exists? Near none.  Do you build bindings to
to Microsoft's APIs?  Do you use other bindings like those that exist
for PostgreSQL (or like mine ;-)

What bindings are there for registry use?

Do you need COM access (GNATCOM?)

Which Ada socket binding do you use?

Should the application be written with GNAT specific features? Should
gnatprep be used as a preprocessor for portability?


Linux and FreeBSD application writers face many of these same tough
decisions. The reality at present, is that general purpose application
development is a tougher road to tread at the moment in Ada. Things are
improving with the help of volunteered software from all over, but
I think there needs to much more before the masses will swallow the
challenges that they'll face.

<flame-bait>
Most programmers are wimps!
</flame-bait>

Things need to get easier.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg