Re: The future of Ada is at risk

[Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net>]

Agyaras a �crit :
> Ada and the Open Source community:- there are several problems.

I'm really depressed by the comp.lang.ada messages those days!

> 1) Perception. Ada is still perceived as "the Pentagon language", and is 
> associated in many people's minds with "evil". This perception is very 
> difficult to change.

Ok.

> 2) Complexity. Ada has been designed for large, complex, reliable 
> software systems. Most open source projects are smaller and it is not 
> worth the effort to use Ada: or would you use a tractor in your garden 
> behind your house?

Plain wrong. I've done plenty of Open Source dev with Ada. Ada complex?
Well, this is the language used in many first year university! It is a
large language but you don't need the tasking in all projects and
certainly not all the annexes. C++ is probably lot more complex to get
right and there is far more C++ Open Source projects.

> 3) The quick-and-dirty mentality. This is very widespread in the current 
> IT world. Deadline pressure leads to q&d coding, hence the popularity of 
> dynamic script languages that promise rapid results. Goes completely 
> against the Ada philosophy.

Ok.

> 4) Ada limitations. Certain aspects of Ada are painfully clumsy. The 
> three string libs, unnecessary multitude of I/O libs, primitive 
> exception handling, constructors are not part of the language, 
> finalization is an afterthought,....

Don't see this as THE problem for Ada acceptance.

> 5) Lack of libraries and frameworks. This is due to the unpopularity of 
> the language. Ada needs at least a relational DB binding *that works* 
> with the current open-source RDBMS-es (as opposed to Gnade), she needs a 
> good scientific library, she needs simple but powerful string handling, 
> just to name a few. The catch-22 is that nobody will develop these until 
> there's strong demand for Ada-based s/w, and there won't be strong 
> demand until the libs are available.

What's wrong with GNADE? I've used it in many projects, no problem.

If hard to configure for you, look for gnadelite here:
http://repo.or.cz/ or contribute some useful piece of code to the GNADE
project.

You missed the most important point to me:

6) Lot of people are complaining about missing port and libraries but
very few step forward to do something useful for the community.

There are plenty of projects around to support Ada, like the FSF, the
Ada for Linux group. Why not jump into the wagon and try to get a decent
Mac OS-X port? I mean, there is work to be done and this work need some
task force somehow, it won't happen magically.

Sorry nothing personal, but we get so many messages listing the Ada
"problems" and so little active contribution!

Ada will be what we all do with it!

Best wishes for 2008.

Pascal.

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