meaningfully/compellingly “advertising” Ada on StackOverflow

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

One thing to help Ada “cross the chasm” would be for each of the how-can-I-do-this-in-Ada questions posted here on c.l.a to also be posted in StackOverflow with (at least) the tag Ada.  Of course, there does exist some overlap of participants here on c.l.a with Ada participants in StackOverflow, but conversely there do exist some StackOverflow users who are knowledgable about Ada (or are genuinely-open-mindedly curious about Ada to have already explored Ada) who never or rarely visit c.l.a.

But the A#1 primary goal to accomplish regarding the posting of juicy/revealing questions about Ada code is for strangers who are full-fledged Ada-hater and Ada-agnostic and what-is-this-Ada-that-I-have-never-heard-of people to see actual Ada code that is beautiful and expressive and accomplishing real-world goals, reacting with:
1) “Oh!  Ada can do •that•?!  •That• easily?  •That• correctly?”
and
2) “Oh!  That is a whole lot more readable/safer/elegant in Ada than it would have been in C++ OO, in C++ metatemplate programming, in C, or in Java.”
and
3) “Hmmmmmmmm.  Maybe I ought to try to learn Ada a little bit (at least enough to participate meaningfully in this StackOverflow question).”

Of course, there is far less toleration over at StackOverflow for some of the lengthy free-wheeling debates that we have here at c.l.a, so questions & answers & comments over there should be a little more nose-to-the-grindstone pedagogical—fully mindful of StackOverflow's stern moderation.

Btw, I am not sure that topics that really get c.l.a's blood pumping (e.g., some corner case in Ada tasking; this-way-of-writing-Ada versus that-way-of-writing-Ada intense-conviction purist culture-dominance battles) are topics that would attract people to Ada over on StackOverflow (as opposed to scare them away from Ada).  Also, some dirty-laundry nits about potential mistakes in the ARM might always(!) be better here than over at StackOverflow.

But many of the let's-have-c.l.a.-do-my-homework-for-me category of questions probably should be cross-posted (in reworked StackOverflow-esque format) over at StackOverflow with (at least) the tag Ada to expand the size of the Ada-education audience to the wider population (and to StackOverflow's seemingly higher-up search results via search engines).

Plus the more times Ada is meaningfully mentioned in technical contexts on the WWW, the higher Ada that scores (directly or indirectly) on those perennial rankings of programming languages.  A quantifiable measure of success in this campaign would be measured by Ada moving up at least one position in any one (or all) of these popularity-of-programming-languages rankings that are always coming out (with usually C, Java, C++, and Javascript among the top positions in the ranking).  The goal is not to move Ada to the top five positions; the goal is move Ada from, say, position #22 to position #18.