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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: New IEEE Language Popularity Ratings
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:13:10 -0700
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Date: 2016-08-10T00:13:10-07:00
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Stu Hollander <s.hollander@ghrt.com> writes:
> It's really quite the opposite. C is an unsafe language, C++ is unreadable,
> error-prone and builds on C's worst attributes. Ada is readable, safe, and
> maintainable and was designed (as opposed to C and C++!) from the beginning
> to deal with large systems.

Oh come on, C++ really is an improvement over C, and it was also
designed to deal with large systems.  Whether it does so successfully is
of course debatable, but at least that was the intent.  

I've messed with Ada enough to be convinced it's better than C in just
about every way, and I'd agree it's better at safety and critical
systems than C++, but there are some types of coding that C++ does
easily where I don't know if there's an Ada equivalent.  RAII, the way
the STL fits together, move semantics, etc.  C++11 and later almost feel
like in a scripting language.  Using it for a while makes C seem
unbearable.  I'm nowhere near expert at C++ (I'm maybe intermediate
level by now) but I'm quite comfortable with it and if there's a feature
I don't understand, I can read about it online.  Realtime and embedded
stuff being a niche, Ada's most serious competitor is probably Java
rather than C++.  My buddy who told me about Ada worked on a huge Ada
program that controlled a communications network back in the day, so it
had high reliability requirements but wasn't realtime or close to the
hardware.  Today something like that would probably be written in Java,
or anyway certainly not C.

> As you said the tools are not there. That is enough to kick Ada out
> the door no matter how good the language is. If C and C++ had no
> libraries they'd also be unusable...

C++ certainly loses a lot without the libraries.  C is lower level and
still has its attractions.  I thought Ada had a good FFI anyway, so it
should be possible to wrap the more useful C and C++ libraries for use
by Ada programs.  A lot of good Python and Haskell libraries come from
basically doing that.

Lately I've been looking at this C++ concurrency framework:

  http://www.seastar-project.org/

I'd be interested to know if could map reasonably to Ada.