Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

artifact.one@googlemail.com wrote:

> Hello.
> 
> I am a long time C programmer (10 years plus), having a look
> at Ada for the first time. From my (inadequate) testing, it seems
> that performance of average Ada code is on par with average
> C code, and there's a clear advantage in runtime safety. The
> GNU ada compiler makes pretty sure that there are very few
> platforms without easy access to Ada, so portability should be
> on at least an equal footing too.
> 
> My question is: how come Ada isn't more popular?

Others have given longer scoped responses, and I will concentrate on the
hobbyist POV (I have felt an Ada hobbyist for a long time now): there is a
catch-22 problem with Ada and it is the lack of libraries. This is a
relative problem, consider these points.

1) The standard library is really standard, so this is an advantage if it
does all you need. Also some features (e.g. fixed point, bound checking,
tasking!) are in the language so you don't need extra wrappers around the
basic language or OS.

2) There's no good, easy, almost automatic C binding generator, although the
language has well defined mechanisms for C interfacing. Yes, there was some
generator. No, it is not trivial at present to get it running in my
experience. There's some effort to have Ada integrated into SWIG; this is
promising and IMHO an important selling point to newcomers.

3) There are bindings for quite some important things: Gtk+, Xml parser,
Unicode, CORBA, databases...

Summarizing, the Ada programmer feels a bit pariah when he sees his fellow
C/C++/java friends trying the latest and greatest version of some library.
Either it is unavailable for Ada, or is not up to date, or has to invest
some time in creating or tweaking a binding.

This is something that, as I said, may be important or not at some point,
depending on what you need to do. Also going against the majority of
colleagues is a burden. In my lab almost all development is done in matlab,
C or C++, and these are not all CS people but from other engineering
branches too. It's a shock when you have to use other's code and start to
see random pointers in function declarations, arcane syntax for complex
datatypes (because typedef seems a forbidden word) and so on. In my case,
Ada isn't event a obscure language: it is taught in my university and has
good backing among several high-profile teachers. Even so, I feel very
alone... :)