Re: Newcomers to

[Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org>]

Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:

> There's historically been a major problem with promoting Ada and I'm
> now wondering if someone has succeeded in promoting Ada and we don't
> even know about it. :-)

I have probably been somewhat aware of Ada through having been
previously been involved in software for the US DoD and also because it
was used in a course (on concurrency, perhaps?) that I attended at The
Ohio State University. I also found it encouraging that in recent years
there have been further standardization efforts and new books in print.
There hasn't been any recent stimulus though apart from the "internal"
one that I finished up with some of my Erlang learning and wanted to
look at where Ada might be a better choice. (At work, like many other
people, I am mostly stuck with using Java.)

Ada does look good but, as far as I can tell, if I ever want to use it
for any software not to be distributed under the GPL, I'm faced with
dealing with a subscription model (with goodness knows what guarantees
of ongoing affordability) negotiated with a private corporation, so
personally I'll probably actually not invest any more time into learning
about Ada and disappear from here and use something else for my
projects. I wish you guys all the best though: I am glad to have dropped
in and seen that your community is even more alive and well than I'd
guessed, so you're clearly quite attractive for some!

-- Mark