Ada is popular after all

Ada is popular after all

[Ludovic Brenta]

Remember my tirade [1] about how some languages are the "zen masters"
of programming? I quickly looked at the results of Debian's Popularity
Contest [2], which ranks packages in Debian according to their
popularity. (This ranking helps choose which CD-ROM or DVD-ROM each
package ships on. There are currently 23 CD-ROMs or 3 DVD-ROMs for
i386 alone.)

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/27adfc53e2cb4ac1
[2] http://popcon.debian.org

I only looked at the "zen master" languages and at the "votes" column
in the popularity contest results. Here is what I found:

Language Package      Votes
---------------------------
Ada      gnat         98
Pascal   fp-compiler  65
Pascal   gpc          55
Eiffel   smarteiffel  20
Modula-2 m2c          4
Oberon   oo2c         1

Granted, the two Pascal compilers combined beat gnat, but just look at
the graph on [3] for the evolution since 2004. Something's happening.

[3] http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?
packages=fp-compiler%2C+gnat%2C
+gpc&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1

Another thing that makes Ada trendy nowadays is the enduring series of
articles by Yves Bailly in GNU/Linux Magazine France. The December
issue contains article #14 in the series, ending with a mention of
"the next article"...

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Yves Bailly]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Remember my tirade [1] about how some languages are the "zen masters"
> of programming? I quickly looked at the results of Debian's Popularity
> Contest [2], which ranks packages in Debian according to their
> [...]
> Granted, the two Pascal compilers combined beat gnat, but just look at
> the graph on [3] for the evolution since 2004. Something's happening.

It seems we're many to work hard to promote Ada in some way or another,
so in the long run there's hope ;-)

> Another thing that makes Ada trendy nowadays is the enduring series of
> articles by Yves Bailly in GNU/Linux Magazine France. The December
> issue contains article #14 in the series, ending with a mention of
> "the next article"...

Thanks for noting them :-) I hope you found them valuable enough, you
most probably didn't learn anything, but hopefully some might "see the
light". I can say that I received numerous feedback for those articles
(asking for source code, more details, etc.), already more than for
my serie on Qt (C++, 24 on Qt3, 8 on Qt4). So yes, it seems that Ada
is rather popular after all.

If you have any comment about the articles, please let me know.

Regards,

-- 
(o< | Yves Bailly  : http://kafka-fr.net   | -o)
//\ | Linux Dijon  : http://www.coagul.org | //\
\_/ |                                      | \_/`

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Ludovic Brenta]

Yves Bailly writes:
[Ada articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France]
> I can say that I received numerous feedback for those articles
> (asking for source code, more details, etc.), already more than for
> my serie on Qt (C++, 24 on Qt3, 8 on Qt4). So yes, it seems that Ada
> is rather popular after all.

I'm glad to hear that.

> If you have any comment about the articles, please let me know.

Just one: they're really good.  I bought all issues of GMLF where they
appear, except for Jan and Feb 2007 because I couldn't find them in
Brussels.  Keep up the good work!

At a local GNU/Linux copy party, I once introduced Ada to two students
in CS, and noted that "unfortunately Ada is not a fashionable
language".  One of the students said: "oh yes, it is fashionable, what
with all these articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France!"

I hope you find more to say about Ada in future articles.  It seems
you've now covered pretty much everything about the language, but
maybe (just a suggestion) you might like to extend the series with Toy
Lovelace, Qt4Ada or GtkAda?

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Frederic Praca]

Le Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:28:09 +0100,
Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> a écrit :

> Yves Bailly writes:
> [Ada articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France]
> > I can say that I received numerous feedback for those articles
> > (asking for source code, more details, etc.), already more than for
> > my serie on Qt (C++, 24 on Qt3, 8 on Qt4). So yes, it seems that Ada
> > is rather popular after all.
> 
> I'm glad to hear that.
> 
> > If you have any comment about the articles, please let me know.
> 
> Just one: they're really good.  I bought all issues of GMLF where they
> appear, except for Jan and Feb 2007 because I couldn't find them in
> Brussels.  Keep up the good work!
> 
> At a local GNU/Linux copy party, I once introduced Ada to two students
> in CS, and noted that "unfortunately Ada is not a fashionable
> language".  One of the students said: "oh yes, it is fashionable, what
> with all these articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France!"
> 
> I hope you find more to say about Ada in future articles.  It seems
> you've now covered pretty much everything about the language, but
> maybe (just a suggestion) you might like to extend the series with Toy
> Lovelace, Qt4Ada or GtkAda?
And (another suggestion) why not talking about OpenRavenscar
(http://polaris.dit.upm.es/~ork/ ) or MarteOS
(http://marte.unican.es/ ) which allow to code in Ada for Real Time
embedded systems ?

Fred

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Yves Bailly]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Yves Bailly writes:
>> If you have any comment about the articles, please let me know.
> Just one: they're really good.  I bought all issues of GMLF where they
> appear, except for Jan and Feb 2007 because I couldn't find them in
> Brussels.  Keep up the good work!
> 
> At a local GNU/Linux copy party, I once introduced Ada to two students
> in CS, and noted that "unfortunately Ada is not a fashionable
> language".  One of the students said: "oh yes, it is fashionable, what
> with all these articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France!"

:-) That's nice to read, all this work lead to something after all!
 
> I hope you find more to say about Ada in future articles.  It seems
> you've now covered pretty much everything about the language, but
> maybe (just a suggestion) you might like to extend the series with Toy
> Lovelace, Qt4Ada or GtkAda?

About ToyLovelace, I'm trying to convince Xavier Grave (the author) to
write something about it by himself. Qt4Ada is not yet enough advanced
I'm afraid (but it's improving). And there has been already an article
about GtkAda in GLMF :
http://www.fdn.fr/~sdescarp/realisations/articles/LM66/LM66_Ada GTK+, le duo
gagnant.html
Also, I don't know Gtk well enough to write anything sensible about it.

I was trying to write something about Annex E, using Glade, but with no
luck. It seems there are some problems in the latest Glade, at least it's
what have been said in this forum (the thread starting at "Help with Glade
(Annex E) on Windows" by Gene).

About OpenRavenscar or MarteOS (to answer Frederic), I have absolutely *no*
experience in real-time or embedded programming, so I won't write anything
about it. But if you wish to write something yourself, I'd be glad to
introduce you to GLMF's redactor-in-chief.

There's also that stupid convention, according to which there's *only* 24h
a day. In combination with another stupid convention which says you have
to work 8-10h a day to earn money so that you and your family can eat at
lunch, it doesn't left much room to find nice ideas :-/

Anyway, any idea is welcome!

Regards,

-- 
(o< | Yves Bailly  : http://kafka-fr.net   | -o)
//\ | Linux Dijon  : http://www.coagul.org | //\
\_/ |                                      | \_/`

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Pascal Obry]

Ludovic Brenta a �crit :
> I hope you find more to say about Ada in future articles.  It seems
> you've now covered pretty much everything about the language, but
> maybe (just a suggestion) you might like to extend the series with Toy
> Lovelace, Qt4Ada or GtkAda?

or AWS ?

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|              http://www.obry.net
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key C1082595

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 
> Language Package      Votes
> ---------------------------
> Ada      gnat         98

This is an unidentified version, presumably the default. There's also

gnat-4.1   97
gnat-3.3    5
gnat-3.4    2
gnat-3.2    1
gnat-4.0    1

How do they fit into this?

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!"
Monty Python's Flying Circus
53

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Ludovic Brenta]

Jeffrey R. Carter writes:
> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>>
>> Language Package      Votes
>> ---------------------------
>> Ada      gnat         98
>
> This is an unidentified version, presumably the default. There's also
>
> gnat-4.1   97
> gnat-3.3    5
> gnat-3.4    2
> gnat-3.2    1
> gnat-4.0    1
>
> How do they fit into this?

Indeed, gnat is the default, per Debian Policy for Ada.  In Sarge,
that was gnat 3.15p but now in Etch, it is almost empty and provides
just one symbolic link: /usr/bin/gnatgcc -> gcc-4.1.  Most importantly
it depends on the actual compiler package, gnat-4.1.

The other versions (3.3 .. 4.0) are older and no longer provided in
Debian.  They were never supported anyway.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

My interpretation of the pop-con numbers is not quite as optimistic as
yours, but we are definitely not going backwards compared to other
languages.

> Another thing that makes Ada trendy nowadays is the enduring series
> of articles by Yves Bailly in GNU/Linux Magazine France. The
> December issue contains article #14 in the series, ending with a
> mention of "the next article"...

Sounds good.

I am working on another attempt to improve the popularity of Ada:

I just started teaching the course on POSIX programming at DMU-Syd
(http://www.dmusyd.edu/) for the second time.  This time I am using
Ada.  Last year I tought the same course using C.  It is still too
early to tell if it works out significantly better using Ada.  So far
I can just say that I haven't had any complaints about the choice of
language.

Formally the whole education is based on Java, but I got an excemption
from that rule when I was hired, so I am free to use Ada, Bash and C
as I see fit.

Doing POSIX programming in Ada is not quite as easy as I hoped:

 - There are apparently holes in the POSIX/Ada API compared to the
   POSIX/C API (utmp/wtmp comes to mind).

 - We have no easy alternative to "man 2 <system call>" and "man 3
   <library call>".

 - Some design choices in the POSIX/Ada API seem illogical (error
   handling comes to mind).

 - Some implementation choices in Florist seem rather inefficient
   (access permissions come to mind).

 - Florist is buggy on Ubuntu (procedure Open_Or_Create comes to
   mind).

I make the course materials available at
<http://edb.jacob-sparre.dk/Posix_in_Ada/>.

Comments and corrections are very welcome.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
     My brain needs a "back" button so I can
         remember where I left my coffee mug.

Re: Ada is popular after all (POSIX binding)

[Guillaume Foliard]

Hello,

Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> Doing POSIX programming in Ada is not quite as easy as I hoped:
> 
>  - There are apparently holes in the POSIX/Ada API compared to the
>    POSIX/C API (utmp/wtmp comes to mind).
> 
>  - We have no easy alternative to "man 2 <system call>" and "man 3
>    <library call>".
> 
>  - Some design choices in the POSIX/Ada API seem illogical (error
>    handling comes to mind).
> 
>  - Some implementation choices in Florist seem rather inefficient
>    (access permissions come to mind).
> 
>  - Florist is buggy on Ubuntu (procedure Open_Or_Create comes to
>    mind).
> 
> I make the course materials available at
> <http://edb.jacob-sparre.dk/Posix_in_Ada/>.
> 
> Comments and corrections are very welcome.


It might be interesting to share your views with the team working on the Ada
POSIX binding revision. The ISO standard is currently being revised, and
volunteers/contributors are welcome.
You will find informations on the standard revision there :
http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG9/n479.pdf

Guillaume

Re: Ada is popular after all (POSIX binding)

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Guillaume Foliard wrote:

> It might be interesting to share your views with the team working on
> the Ada POSIX binding revision. The ISO standard is currently being
> revised, and volunteers/contributors are welcome.  You will find
> informations on the standard revision there :
> http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG9/n479.pdf

Thanks for the invitation.  I'm already in touch with Stephen Michell
and signed up on the POSIX-Ada-comment mailing list.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
�When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while
 the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under
 similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more
 interested in Ada!�                                     -- Robert Dewar

Re: Ada is popular after all

[Alex R. Mosteo]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> Remember my tirade [1] about how some languages are the "zen masters"
> of programming? I quickly looked at the results of Debian's Popularity
> Contest [2], which ranks packages in Debian according to their
> popularity. (This ranking helps choose which CD-ROM or DVD-ROM each
> package ships on. There are currently 23 CD-ROMs or 3 DVD-ROMs for
> i386 alone.)
> 
> [1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/27adfc53e2cb4ac1
> [2] http://popcon.debian.org
> 
> I only looked at the "zen master" languages and at the "votes" column
> in the popularity contest results. Here is what I found:
> 
> Language Package      Votes
> ---------------------------
> Ada      gnat         98
> Pascal   fp-compiler  65
> Pascal   gpc          55
> Eiffel   smarteiffel  20
> Modula-2 m2c          4
> Oberon   oo2c         1
> 
> Granted, the two Pascal compilers combined beat gnat, but just look at
> the graph on [3] for the evolution since 2004. Something's happening.
> 
> [3] http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?
> packages=fp-compiler%2C+gnat%2C
> +gpc&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1
> 
> Another thing that makes Ada trendy nowadays is the enduring series of
> articles by Yves Bailly in GNU/Linux Magazine France. The December
> issue contains article #14 in the series, ending with a mention of
> "the next article"...

Also this newsgroup seems more alive than ever...