Re: is ada dead?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

tspivey8@home.com (tyler spivey) wrote in message news:<ko517.630989$166.13106618@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>...

> is ada dead?

  Hardly, there are many thousands of people making their living
  with Ada these days. A useful thing to remember is that in this
  field, for some reason, if a technology is not dominant, people
  assume it is dead (e.g. people often think of PL/1, OS/2, Pascal,
  Forth etc being dead [all are widely used], and I have even met
  people who thought COBOL was dead [COBOL is still one of the most
  widely used languages]). It's not like that in other fields, no
  one thinks that the Rolls Royce is dead just because they don't
  see thousands of them everywhere.

> is it only used in department of defense?

  Not unless the DoD has much wider influence than I thought and is
  for example in charge of running the cable movie business in France
  (Canal Plus), Air Traffic Control systems all over the world (Vision
  Systems), Internet routing technology (TopLayer), Commercial aviation    
  (Boeing), and Medical Instrumentation (JEOL), just to name a few
  examples.

> is it easy/hard to learn?

  Easier than most languages, for three reasons:

    1. The language is designed to make it easy to read programs,
       which is very useful everywhere, but especially for learning
       it makes examples easier to understand.

    2. Compilers are available which give very good error messages.

    3. At run-time, many beginner's errors are immediately detected
       with clear messages, rather than causing mysterious chaos

> wil it die soon?

   Not clear that any language dies out completely, but Ada is not
   about to disappear any time soon (some of the contracts our company
   has expect to need support for 20 years just on the current    
   projects), and new projects are starting up in Ada all the time.