Investigating Ada

Investigating Ada

[Phoebe]

Hi everyone,
I have been looking into Ada as a new language to pick up. I tend to use C 
for most projects, but I enjoy learning new things. I'm already sold on the 
value of the language itself from a technical point of view, but my concern 
is that it might have a rather small userbase, especially without the Ada 
Mandate. I am having trouble finding recent FAQs or usage information. It's 
easy to come across something from like 1994, but that's over ten years ago 
;)
I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could comment 
on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the other languages 
which surely must have incorporated a lot of its advantages by now. Thanks 

Re: Investigating Ada

[Matthew Heaney]

"Phoebe" <no@nospam.net> writes:

> I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could
> comment on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the
> other languages which surely must have incorporated a lot of its
> advantages by now. Thanks

You can poke around at gnat.com for up-to-date information:

<http://www.gnat.com/aa_lectures.php>


I myself have been involved with the development of the standard
container library that is being added to Ada 2005.  Ada's new container
library is modelled very closely on the STL, so if you know C++ then
you'll be on familiar turf.  (The library is included in GCC 4.)

Re: Investigating Ada

[Martin Dowie]

Phoebe wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I have been looking into Ada as a new language to pick up. I tend to use C 
> for most projects, but I enjoy learning new things. I'm already sold on the 
> value of the language itself from a technical point of view, but my concern 
> is that it might have a rather small userbase, especially without the Ada 
> Mandate. I am having trouble finding recent FAQs or usage information. It's 
> easy to come across something from like 1994, but that's over ten years ago 
> ;)
> I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could comment 
> on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the other languages 
> which surely must have incorporated a lot of its advantages by now. Thanks 

There is a recent users survey over at:

http://www.adaic.org/news/survey-results.html

Cheers

-- Martin

Re: Investigating Ada

[Martin Krischik]

Phoebe wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> I have been looking into Ada as a new language to pick up. I tend to use C
> for most projects, but I enjoy learning new things. I'm already sold on
> the value of the language itself from a technical point of view, but my
> concern is that it might have a rather small userbase, especially without
> the Ada Mandate. I am having trouble finding recent FAQs or usage
> information. It's easy to come across something from like 1994, but that's
> over ten years ago ;)

Ahh yes, the old pages have a better google rating - no one knows why. Here
some pages with newer dates:

September 29, 2005, at 08:12 AM:
http://ada.krischik.com/

15:05, 1 October 2005 203.197.76.86:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming

Tuesday October 4th, 2005
http://www.adaworld.com/

> I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could
> comment on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the other
> languages which surely must have incorporated a lot of its advantages by
> now. Thanks

Now that PC become more powerfull and therefore can better handle feature
rich languages Ada has a little revival. 

Mind you: when saying feature rich one take into account the C ISO standart
is only a few pages shorter then the Ada ISO standart and C++ has a wooping
200 pages more. The former slim languages have caught up (but they have put
on a lot of "backward compatibility fat" instead of "feature muskels").

Martin

-- 
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com

Re: Investigating Ada

[Jim Rogers]

 
"Phoebe" <no@nospam.net> wrote in news:4cE0f.1602$ir4.1138@edtnps90:

> I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could
> comment on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the
> other languages which surely must have incorporated a lot of its
> advantages by now. Thanks 

Interestingly, very few languages have incorporated a lot of Ada's
advantages by now.

I do not know of any language with as robust and powerful capabilities
in concurrency as Ada.

Very few languages allow you to define your own numeric types without
also requiring you to explicitly define all the operators for that
type.
Very few languages require complete coverage of all values in a
case statement.
Very few languages support run-time polymorphism without requiring
the use of pointers or references.

Generic programming is common in C++, but introduces a new syntax
to the language. Ada's generic capabilities are implemented using
standard Ada syntax.

Very few languages provide the automatically defined capabilities
of Ada attributes.

Very few languages provide the fine degree of control over data
representation provided by Ada.

Jim Rogers

Re: Investigating Ada

[adaworks]

"Jim Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in message
news:6Zm1f.116464$qY1.5654@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
>
> "Phoebe" <no@nospam.net> wrote in news:4cE0f.1602$ir4.1138@edtnps90:
>
> > I'm going to learn it anyway, but I'm just hoping that people could
> > comment on its popularity, and also how it has kept up against the
> > other languages which surely must have incorporated a lot of its
> > advantages by now. Thanks
>
> Interestingly, very few languages have incorporated a lot of Ada's
> advantages by now.
>
Nice list of Ada's benefits in your post.   It seems that most programmers
are more interested in convenience during development than they are the
long-term health of a software product.  The latter concern should be
a management issue, but not many managers are prepared to understand
the problem well enough to choose Ada.

I am currently teaching a graduate seminar titled "Software Evolution."
We are examining the issues related to the lifecycle of a software
system, including how to plan for its continued adaptability to new
user requirements, new environments, and new hardware.  Sometimes
this is thought of as maintenance.

Planning for software evolution, which manifests itself in many forms and
technical demands, is becoming more and more essential.    One approach
is to simply plan to rewrite the code every so often.  This is currently a
popular choice among those who write software in HTML, XML, scripting
languages, etc.   However, rewrite is not a good choice for the majority
of software systems.

As we examine the language alternatives, Ada comes through as a sound
choice.   It is becoming increasing clear that, while extensible software can
be written in most contemporary languages, the very design of those languages
discourages this kind of planned evolution.   Java and Eiffel are fairly good.
C++, as currently practiced and programmed, is horrible.  I suppose C++
is not to blame, but its practitioners seemed determined to prevent anyone
from understanding their code well-enough to extend it.

So, as we study the problem of software evolution, Ada is clearly a good
choice.

Richard Riehle