Re: The future of Ada is at risk

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

On 11 Sty, 08:21, "Phaedrus" <phaedrus...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Instead of making this an
> Ada-love-fest, how about doing some honest soul-searching about what's
> missing, wrong, or just too hard for the programming world in general?

My 0.05 Euro:

Ada lacks libraries. The standard library is close to disaster and too
many times when I was asking for something here I heard "do it
yourself". Sure I can do everything myself and - being a geek - even
find it funny, but that does not translate to successful projects,
especially commercial ones, where deadlines matter more than fun.
In particular, frequent statements about Ada guaranteeing short
development are negated by the bare fact that I have to reinvent too
many wheels to get something of reasonable functional complexity.
There are some extension libraries (GNAT), but even those seem to be
half-baked. This does matter in general-purpose programming.
If you compare it to C++ you might be tempted to claim that both
languages are equal in this aspect, because the standard library in C+
+ is also not very impressive. The difference, however, is that C++
binds *directly* to whatever system API is available on a given
platform. That changes a lot.
I don't think that this problem can be easily solved. Comprehensive
libraries cannot be written a single person and for obvious reasons
there will never be a huge community of enthusiasts willing to spend
their time building something new.

{That said, I have to admit that I find AWS just awesome.}

Ada is not likely to recruit newcomers, because it lacks an easy to
read tutorial. No, I don't find the existing on-line material to be
compelling - either too dense, or too slow, or badly formatted.
For an example of *good* tutorial (I'm not talking about the language
which is described, but about the form) see:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

> 3.  Perception/PR
>
> Let's face it; the lady has a bad reputation.

I wouldn't say so, at least not in the communities I know. Ada has an
excellent reputation. I think that outside of US nobody really cares
about DoD and what matters more is the immediate mental association
with real-time, control systems, and such. The problem is that with
this positive reputation comes some kind of prejudice that "it is so
professional that I will never be able to learn it". On the other
hand, nobody fears PHP: "every kid on the block knows it, so I can
learn it too".
Bad news: you cannot do anything about it.

> 4. Ease of deployment

I think it is related to the issue of libraries.

> And worse
> yet, we might all have to go work in Java! *gag*

Identify what Java does right (consolidated libraries and good quality
tutorials) and do it as well.

--
Maciej Sobczak * www.msobczak.com * www.inspirel.com