Re: Weakness of Ada is expensive / security / etc. ? Anything else?

[Serge Robyns <serge.robyns@gmail.com>]

On Monday, 20 July 2015 05:40:55 UTC+3, Norman Worth  wrote:
> On 7/17/2015 4:19 AM, Trish Cayetano wrote:
>   But every Ada programmer has (fairly often) screamed at the compiler 
> "I didn't do that!" or "What the hell does that mean!" while staring at 
> an obscure error message.  He then clicks in the appropriate place to 
> get the ARM reference and, momentarily, is even more confused.

Oh yes! Especially coming from the C class language families.

> > -	Strong typing - can be used to reduce the scope (and cost) of analysis
> 
> 		Those of us who are used to it love it.  Others really hate it.  This 

This is what keeps Ada as general purpose language alive, but for how long?

>  > -     It is difficult to find interfaces to standard libraries, like 
> Motif or the Windows GUI libraries or databases or to the standard 
> scientific libraries written for Fortran or C.
> 
> 		This can be a real problem.  Most big projects rely on standard 
> libraries, and almost any user interface requires a GUI these days.  The 
> interfaces often exist, but they can be hard to find.  In some cases, 
> they are proprietary.  GTKAda provides an interface to the GTK+ 
> graphical interface routines for Linux.  Unfortunately, it is hard to 
> use compared to Visual C++, and the documentation is difficult.  GNAT 
> from AdaCore provides a Windows interface. (I haven't tried it.)  There 
> is an old interface to XLib and Motif that used to work, but I haven't 
> seen it in years.  GNAT from AdaCore has interfaces to some databases, 
> including an ODBC interface, but databases do not seem to be well 
> supported in general.
> 

This is the killer for Ada acceptance.  All other languages provides those libraries and are "usually" well documented.  I had to revert to this forum to help me understanding why my XML SAX validating reader was not working, although I followed the examples posted by AdaCore.  The solution is "read the source", which works when you already know the library well enough but not when you are learning how to use it.

I'm surprised that the AdaCore GNATCOLL SQL library has no "standard" support for Oracle, although it was already there in GNADE from which GNATCOLL SQL was build.  I'm ok to work and contribute back, but this removes me from my own project.  Moreover, the code is quite "shaky" and not resilient at all, which came as a bad surprise to me or a language like ADA.