From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-07 04:29:25 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!sjc70.webusenet.com!news.webusenet.com!newsfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!harp.news.atl.earthlink.net!not-for-mail From: Richard Riehle Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea.. Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 04:38:19 -0800 Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering Message-ID: <3E1ACA3B.BFEAB222@adaworks.com> References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> Reply-To: richard@adaworks.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 41.b2.40.7b Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Server-Date: 7 Jan 2003 12:29:24 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32665 Date: 2003-01-07T12:29:24+00:00 List-Id: 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