Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

What you describe are things that could be fixed with some version of a 
Conventional Ada Library. Especially things like tools for manipulating 
a variety of standard file types (images, sounds, movies, etc.) - but I 
wouldn't stop there. Any of the things we see in libraries for Ada or 
other languages that are hanging around out there as either part of the 
compiler or an add-on being sold or given away somewhere is fair game 
for a library. With imagination, Ada could even go beyond that and make 
itse3lf *more* useful than any other programming language out there.

It may not be entirely fair to criticize those who want to debate 
language issues - its a newsgroup and its on-topic, so if those subjects 
come up, it isn't at all counter-productive. I agree that those who are 
responsible for the language design (The ARG, et alia) should focus on 
bigger issues than what may get discussed here - but I don't have any 
evidence that they are hung up debating the relative merits of "+=" vs 
":=". I think they are likely concentrating on doing the right things.

What I'd suggest is that if you believe as I do that a common library 
full of lots of utility code is a good thing for making Ada more 
popular, then agitate to get it. Vendors and the ARG are sensitive to 
what people are asking for - especially if they are paying customers. 
Come up with ideas for what you'd find useful in a library and make 
those ideas known. Be willing to help out in some manner if/when the 
opportunity is there.

I think its possible to make Ada more useful with a library. I 
sympathize with your tolerance level for trying to collect up artifacts 
to do a job. I think you're right - most programmers are *not* going to 
search the net endlessly for all the pieces and struggle to get it all 
pulled together and working. It needs to work out of the box. That's why 
its important to have the involvement of the vendors in defining and 
producing a library - so that it will just work right out of the box. 
Find ways to try to help that to happen & maybe we'll get some results.

MDC



chris wrote:
> 
> In my opinion Ada's problem is the same as that faced by many other 
> languages.  When you want to do something the tools aren't there or you 
> can't find them!!!  (or they're not easy to install; my tolerance of 
> dependancy depth goes to 1 easy to install lib, no more!  IME other 
> people exhibit a similar tolerance).
> 
> Recently I wanted to take jpegs, (Windows) bitmaps and png images and 
> use them as textures for OpenGL surfaces.  I could find no way of 
> handling bitmaps in Ada out of the box.  Tonights task is to handle 
> windows bitmaps!  Tomorrows task is to keep at the LibPng binding and 
> implement a library to save/load images in the png, bitmap, jpeg formats 
> and anything else.  One that is simple and portable.  I really need 
> facilities for working with images!
> 
> A while ago it was scripting, I had to implement a binding to Lua to get 
> it.  Before that it was something else, and I really couldn't be a***ed 
> doing it!  Recently I've gone back to Uni; we'll get Java, C# and 
> depending on which project I get, possibly C or C++.  The nice thing 
> about any of those languages is I don't have to be a***ed to implement 
> anything but the system at hand!
> 
> I'm seriously considering C++ instead of Ada, even though it lacks 
> concurrency, just to get access to a wide variety of libs*.  It also 
> doesn't help when (some of) the community seem more interested in 
> discussing single assignment operators or unbounded/bounded strings than 
> addressing the important issues!  In the end the world isn't gonna give 
> a sh*t if sw uses "a += 1" instead of "a := a + 1", or the nature of a 
> string.  It is going to care if sw works, development is productive and 
> the tools to develop are there!
> 
> Languages become or remain insignificant when people using them argue 
> about trivial or academic issues and things don't get done!  It happens 
> with many functional languages, where the aesthetics of type systems and 
> stateful computations are all that people discuss (apart from 
> "factorial" or "fib").  And it's happening here...
> 
> 
> 
> Chris
> 
> *I have no issue with libs that are available!
> 


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Marin David Condic
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