Re: Why C++ is successful

[Rakesh Malhotra <rakesh.malhotra@safetran.com>]

Dave Martin wrote:
> [lots of stuff deleted]
 
> Throughout all this, I also heard about modula-2 and ada.  Ada was
> specifically not object oriented, everyone seemed to hate it, and it
> was being mandated by the federal government, and I'd heard several
> horror stories from people who had been forced to write in ada.  Also,
> there was the holier-than-thou attitude that ada proponents seemed to
> have. This combination of factors did not make ada look good (esp the
> mandate and the lack of O-O).  I could understand the desire behind
> ada, but it seemed like the implementation was just not good.  As for
> modula-2, I just never got into it.
> [deleted stuff]

Just a short response on the above topic - just to get the facts
straight.  The 2nd revision of the Ada standard was released in 1995 and
in its current form Ada is fully object-oriented, including dynamic
dispatching and inheritance.

Personally, I work in the commercial industry in the US where Ada is not
mandated (never has been) and we use Ada very successfully and intend to
continue doing so.  The reasons for us using it are very straight
forward - while no current language can force good design or good
programming practices, languages like Ada or Eiffel certainly encourage
these good design/programming practices.  We use Ada for its support of
sound software engineering principles resulting in software that is
highly reliable, maintainable, readable, portable etc, without expending
the kinds of effort needed with other languages.

A lot of the "holier-than-thou attitude" 's, if they ever did indeed
exist, are certainly not there anymore.  Most people that I have bumped
into who use Ada are very much down to earth folks who are just trying
to get a job done well.  Also, while you are very correct regarding
Ada83 compiler implementations ("horror stories")  , today, there are
very good Ada compilers available, including for free (www.gnat.com),
and most vendors have brought prices down to the same level as for C,
C++ compilers.  

The biggest problem that Ada suffers from today is an image one.  Lots
of people perceive it as being poor,slow,old technology etc and hate it
without ever having written a line of code in it.  As someone who has
used Ada, C, C++, etc for many years, I would just like to say that that
is all it is - image - and does not really reflect reality.  

--
Rakesh