Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> O.K. I hope I can make myself crystal clear on this one: I am NOT opposed to
> reliability nor do I think it is irrelevant or should be taken out of the
> language or anything of that sort.

Programmers, most of them I know, don't care a whit about reliability.  They
care about convenience.    Remember when we would teach Ada 83 and
we had to show the students how to instantiate a generic package so they
could do simple I/O?   Remember how difficult it was, with Ada 83
to do  simple file management?    Remember how frustrating it was to
format an MS-DOS screen using standard Ada?    Remember how the
students reacted when exposed to the visibility rules?

Most of those new Ada programmers just wanted to write simple programs
to get started.  Many wanted to use Ada on their home machines to do
little projects for fun.   I recall the Meridian compiler had a DOS package
that was pretty good, but still fell short of what we needed.  For example,
with the overpriced Alsys compiler, one could access any part of memory
because the type Address allowed it.   With the Meridian compiler the
type Address was a type signed integer so one could not directly address
the display address values in the upper 360KB of DOS space.   Sounds
silly.  Maybe, but it prevented one of my customers from doing the kind
of high-peformance graphics they could do with Alsys.

We have the defined the language for technical people and made it almost
inaccessible to those who simply want to do the kind of programming they
usually do with Fortran.   We have some libraries, finally, for doing GUI
programming, but too late to inspire the ordinary programmer to take a
second look.   My students are at different levels of capability.  Some love
to program with John English's JEWL package since it so easy to do so
many interesting Windows programs.  Others love CLAW.   At least one
pair of students did a great M.S. thesis using GtkAda.

One of the saddest things was the abandonment of the Java Byte Code
initiative from GNAT.   Yes, I realize there was insufficient commercial
demand.  However, I had generated a lot of interest in it at NPS until it
turned out that the existing version was not up-to-date with the current
JVM capabilities.  My colleagues, at first enthusiastic, quickly lost
interest.  In the parlance of the "romance novel" this is known as
"seduced and abandoned."

Ada is, in my view, the best choice of programming languages for a wide
range of applications, wider than reliabiility-oriented applications, and
wider than most other languages.   I was just reading my new copy of
the Consolidated Ada Language Reference Manual at 2:00 AM this
morning and found myself entertained by the improvement in language,
explanation, and clarification.    We need more literature explaining,
in depth and with examples,  how certain things work.   For example,
someone could do a good tutorial on the mathematical capabilities
of the language using some examples from the Numerical Recipes
Series.     I tried to create a little booklet with my Ada Distilled to
make the language more accessible.   The responses I get from readers
of Ada Distilled has been encouraging and I continue to update and
expand it based on that feedback.

We need more libraries similar to those created by Jerry Van Djik,
such as his NT_Console package.   In fact, that package needs a
little enhancement, but is pretty good as it is.

I have mentioned before, and re-emphasize again, those of us who want
to promote Ada can do nothing better than create commercial applications
using it.  There is not end to the ideas for new applications and no end
to what can be sold in the marketplace.   Where are the games programmed
in Ada and sold in shrink-wrap?   Where are the database applications
created in Ada and marketed to the business community?    Where is the
spreadsheet program written in Ada that makes Excel look like yesterday's
stale bread?

The best way to sell Ada is to use it for building applications that people
use on their computers.   CLAW is a great starting place for creating
such applications for Windows.    GtkAda is a great starting place to
create the sorely needed applications for Linux, a platform where users
are desperate for new applications.

The path to commercial success for Ada is to use it for successful commercial
products.   Harness your own creativity to Ada.    Build products.   Don't
tout them as Ada products but as products that solve a problem.   Only after
your product is wildly successful do you need to reveal that you used Ada.

It is nearly impossible to convince a large corporation to change course in
its choice of programming languages once the bureaucracy has made its
decision.   Such decisions are rarely made on technical grounds.  They
are usually made by people who have little knowledge of software and
less knowledge of programming languages.   They make incredibly
stupid decisions, most often choosing something as disastrous as
C++.   I often suggest to my students that, if C++ is the best we can
do in programming languages, this industry is in trouble for a long
time to come.

Ruby is achieving success because developers are choosing it.   Python
is successful for the same reason.   Eiffel, which should be more
successful, is not as widely received, in part, I suspect because it
is viewed as an expensive commercial alternative.  Ada is now
available in free, downloadble versions similar to Ruby, Smalltalk,
Scheme, and Python.    That is a good start, but not quite enough.

Go and make your fortune with a product created in Ada and you can
walk away from that dour, windowless cubicle in which you have been
imprisoned by some huge defense contractor.  You can build as good or
better products using what we now have available in the Ada language
and its available libraries.

Programmers of the world, choose Ada.  You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Richard Riehle