Re: Future of Ada?

[mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)]

jamwahl@badlands.nodak.edu (Jim) writes:
|> I am just wondering what those who frequent this news group think
|> about the future of Ada.  I've heard a lot of talk that Ada is kind of
|> dying out and that not even the military is using it any more.  Any
|> comments would be greatly appreciated.

Actually, the contrary is true. Ada is a quite nice language that has been
ignored outside military and avionics for a long time, purely because good
compilers were not easily available. With GNAT 3.11 reaching a high level
of maturity now and numerous libraries and bindings becoming available that
make GNAT not only a conforming Ada95 compiler but (much more important!)
also a comfortable and productive development environment that is
even accessible to poor students and academics, the interesting time
for Ada is just about to start. Java is too slow and too restrictive
for low-level programming, C++ is much too dangerous, and Eiffel is
much less widely supported. So Ada95 is currently becomming one of
the most interesting programming languages on the market, together
with the various rapid-prototyping scripting languages such as Python.

I believe that Ada95 is tremendously underhyped.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>