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From: "Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Ada noob here! Is Ada widely used?
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 08:23:19 -0400
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Date: 2010-05-22T08:23:19-04:00
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Duke Normandin wrote:

> Nothing too terribly mind-boggling! ;) Just don't want to spend the time
> learning a "soon-to-be" fossil of a language, with no where to go but in a
> museum. Been there; done that! I'm also looking at learning Miranda - but
> guess what? Nice, simple functional language - but zero community and
> support. It _may_ get a second life - maybe. Meanwhile, I'm liking Ada.

Ada is definitely not a fossil, nor is it likely to become a fossil in the
near future. It's true that Ada doesn't have the tool, library, and community
support that C++ and Java enjoys (in terms of sheer quantity at least), but
there are definitely all three of those things available for Ada. Also the
language has an updated standard in the works.

If you are looking at functional languages have you considered OCaml? It has a
lively community. An alternative might be F#, Microsoft's ML-like functional
language for .NET. It's shiny and new, and Microsoft fully supports it with
Visual Studio 2010. It even runs on Linux/Mono. Other than that I don't know
much about it. :)

Peter