Re: += in ada

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

With the initial target being embedded programming for military systems, 
there were some very real problems with Ada: It was too big for many of 
the processors of its time (and still is for a lot of small embedded 
processors). There was a general lack of good quality compilers that 
would target those processors (and you *really* needed very high quality 
code generation - remember all those efficiency things surrounding 
Ariane 4 and the hand optimizations?) Ada missed supporting things that 
were seen as "critical" to embedded programming - unsigned integers, 
and/or/xor on words, etc. (And I'll spare Robert the jab about the lack 
of sqrt :-) Ada promised a lot to embedded developers (Chapter 13) but 
was very late in delivering it. Developers had lots of specialized tools 
surrounding their embedded projects and Ada wasn't there with 
replacements. Ada was ahead of compiler technology and the hardware on 
which to run the compilers and nobody was willing to "subset" the 
language to get some portion of it working reliably & efficiently in a 
reasonable time frame, etc., etc., etc.

Add to this some perceptual problems backed up by reality initially, but 
they took a long time to cure. Various language constructs were viewed 
as inherently inefficient - backed up by poor quality compilers. Ada was 
viewed as outrageously expensive and too grandeose for embedded 
programming - backed up by outrageously expensive compilers and lack of 
implementations for embedded targets. That list goes on too.

Toss in a major factor of psychology: Embedded programmers are (or at 
least tended to be back then - maybe attitudes have shifted) "Bit 
Twiddlers". Basically guys who get tied up in the small stuff and often 
miss the "Big Picture". They were used to dealing in raw words and bytes 
with shifts and rotates and such. Ada brought to it a discipline they 
weren't used to and didn't like as they saw it standing in their way. 
The value of strong typing in particular was not seen as "user 
friendly". They tried to write "Adatran" code and found it difficult. So 
they saw Ada as some obstacle that was being forced on them by people 
who knew nothing about how the job was really done. At that point they 
hated Ada and no amount of fixing other problems with the language was 
going to get them to start liking it.

That and various bad management decisions on the part of the powers that 
be who were trying to create/promote Ada, and you had a pretty horrible 
reputation right out of the starting gate. This reputation spread like 
wildfire and has been *enormously* hard to overcome. Some of it is 
reality and some of it is myth, but in the world of "Marketing" - 
"Perception *IS* Reality".

Hence - back on subject - I see no reason to believe that adding trivial 
syntax changes is going to in any way win over the crowd that hated Ada 
for a hell of a lot bigger things than lack of a "+=" operator.

MDC


Hyman Rosen wrote:
> 
> 
> So what do you think the "real" reasons are?
> 


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Marin David Condic
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