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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-11 00:35:24 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!cyclone.bc.net!news-in.mts.net!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F602215.3CE9A426@sympatico.ca> From: David Marceau X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.17-10mdksmp i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 03:19:49 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.92.161.65 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1063265251 65.92.161.65 (Thu, 11 Sep 2003 03:27:31 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 03:27:31 EDT Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42371 Date: 2003-09-11T03:19:49-04:00 List-Id: chris wrote: > > Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote: > > > So: Is the writing on the wall for Ada? > > Perhaps. Perhaps not. > > > What is your take on the article? > > Java is attractive even given it's odd bits here and there. I am not > involved in SC systems, or real time systems, but I can see why some > might find Java attractive (in other areas). > > Java has a std container library *now*. Java has a huge developer base. > Java has std and thourough documentation. It is runtime portable and > compile time portable, as opposed to simply compile time portable. It > is funded and advertised by Sun, Borland, IBM and others. The language > provides 3d/2d/image processing facilities and a std gui. It provides > sound facilities and has support for the 3 major desktop platforms out Essentially all you said here is provided because the JDK provides wrapper calls to the real fast c/asm-code implementations running on the destined platform. In fact if the 2d/3d/image processing libs were completely written in java they(especially 3d/image processing stuff) would be even more unusably slow if you're used to ada/c/assembler performance. > Why stop with Ada 95? > > Object Orientation is not easy. If you want 'protected' access you have > to use child packages, not always feasible or desirable. Tasks and > protected objects aren't oo, you can't extend them. No reflection. > Poor library support. Loads of std container libs, no image processing, > etc ..., no applications written to exploit it... and no signs of > apps appearing. All the things you mentioned here about ada's non-easy OO are actually a good thing for Ada. Here are a few reasons: -parallelism in ada's core language....true parallelism IMHO doesn't seem to follow OO much IMHO. It seems more to follow other paradigms. For example look at java's "synchronized" keyword when used with "interface" or function in some inheritance hierarchy. It can actually stop the gui and then the app because when you have more than one coder programming a still immature infrastructure that's what actually happens. The probability of that happening with many ada developers even with an immature infrastructure is definitely reduced again because the language does lots of work for you to make sure things happen really the way everybody wants. Let the java developers try to draw the actual sequence/collaboration diagrams of what actually happened and then figure out how to fix it :) Ada developers still need to deliberately design the sequence/collaborations between the different types(objects if you must) via their package spec services with parallelism in mind but they will definitely be at an advantage when implementing it because of the stronger concurrency capability in the ada language. Again the fact a language has or doesn't have a bunch of libraries only means that someone hasn't built them yet. It's not cast in stone that ada won't have them. The other thing I want to say about the availability of lots of libs for java is that it is smoke and mirrors because lots of this stuff hasn't been tested/used/left-turned-on for a very long time. I never thought I would perceive myself as being conservative but here I am saying that people should wait and see about stuff before using it. I would like to see how long a box running a java-app will stay on without having to be restarted with all those popular libs you talked about 2d/3d/image-processing/media sdk....then come back to me about that. That's where ada shines because "Ada Memory Leaks" is more of an oxymoron than "java memory leaks" or "C memory leaks". Please correct me if I am wrong about that. All this to say the writing is not on the wall for ada. Ditto for java. There's room for lots of languages on this planet. I am just hoping we'll get better at using the right one at the right time :)