Re: If not Ada, what else...

[rriehle@itu.edu]

On Wednesday, August 19, 2015 at 3:58:04 PM UTC-7, Anh Vo wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 19, 2015 at 3:19:45 PM UTC-7, rri...@itu.edu wrote:
> > As to your comment about books, that is why I wrote Ada Distilled, to provide simple, fully coded, tested examples with line-by-line comments.   Although the Ada 2012 version is not quite ready (Ed Colbert of Absolute Software is updating it), many people still seem to find the Ada 95 version (which includes some 2005 examples) useful as a place to get started.   
> > 
> > You are correct about other things.   Greedy compiler and tool vendors ( with the exception of Meridian and RR Software) were overpricing the product so few hobbyists or start-ups could afford to choose Ada.   Only Meridian provided a fully functional Ada compiler for Windows at a reasonable price.    Janus was a really good compiler, but did not have easy support for Windows programming.   Alsys was huge, cumbersome, too expensive, and not suitable for any small organization.  The Alsys complier did generate some pretty good code, but no one was comcerned about that.  There weren't many other options.   
> > 
> > So, community colleges continued to prefer Turbo-Pascal, a product that wowed everyone at the time.  I talked with Phillipe Kahn about Ada.  He would have loved to have had an opportunity to create a Turbo-Ada, but the timing was wrong, and the opportunity was lost.   The one (and perhaps, only) good thing Reifer did when he was in charge at AJPO was fund the initial work on GNAT.   Once he left AJPO, he began to publicly disparage Ada, and that did not help at all.
> > 
> > The poorly worded letter from Emmett Page set the stage for Ada's quick demise within the DoD.   Now, there is no mandate, and most of the pekple I know in the DoD software community have interpreted that letter as, not simply cancelling the mandate, but cancelling Ada in favor of anything but Ada.   The camcellation of the mandate was a premature and devaststing event, occurring exactly at the moment when Ada, as a language design (Ads 95) was poised for extraordinary success.   
> > 
> > 
> > Ada, as a programming language, is still one of the very best for real engineering of software solutions (not so good for Q&D or hacking), but we have very few engineers in software pracrice.   We have lots of talented programmers, but few of them have any engineering background or understanding of engineering.   An interesting outcome of learning Ada, for many of them, was a better understanding of what we really meant by the term, software engineering.   
> > 
> > We, the past and present devotees of Ada, have made a lot of mistakes.   It is not clear that we can recover from the bad impression so many of our software developer colleagues have regarding Ada.   However, the new standard includes some advanced computer science and software engineering features not present in other, if any, software engineering languages: axiomatic program design (Hoare, Dijkstra), predicate calculus expressions, and much more.   
> > 
> > We can, perhaps, rescue Ada's reputation, by reaching out beyond our own narrow community with information about these powerful capabilities.   That can include more academic papers that use Ada, more articles in places that programmers read, offering to teach an Ada class at local colleges, and using Ada for more applications that real people use.   
> > 
> > I am now old, soon to enjoy my 80th birthday.  My time as an advocate will soon have passed.   Perhaps some of you who are younger can find the coursfe and energy to do something to promote real software engineering using the one language designed to support an engineering approach to software development: Ada.  It is, in my view, still Ada.   It is cerainly not C++. Never has been.   Why would anyone choose a language that is inherently error-prone and expect a result that is error-free?
> > 
> 
> Happy birthday Richard. 
> 
> I am not sure if how many people have read this article. I have enjoyed it very much. As the result, I am proud to say that Ada and Spark doing better than the rest when compared 11 other university projects. This success story will brighten your birthday even more.
> 
> http://www.adacore.com/press/spark-going-to-the-moon/
> 
> Anh Vo

Thanks, Anh.  I am pleased to see that some good projects are being developed in Ada.  We need to publicize this one, and any others that demonstrate the unique properties of software created with Ada.

My 80th is a few months away, but thanks for the congratulatory note. 

Send me your email address, please.  Mine, my personal email is laoxiaohai@juno.com.   I may have something to send you.    

Richard