Re: Ada and QNX

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>]

Igor Kovalenko wrote
>Did you intentionally overlooked the fact that some new languages found
>their way into mainstream and some did not? They all faced similar
>uphill battle against historical issues and human prejudice.
>Nevertheless, Java did hit the streets. And C++ did, roughly at the same
>time as Ada failed. Sure C++ had advantage of being similar to C, but
>then Ada is similar enough to Pascal. Perl emerged as major scripting
>language although I doubt there was anything like dedicated marketing
>support and there were and still are many competitors. How would you
>explain all that?

C++ found its way to the mainstream for two reasons 1) G++ was free. 2) a
better C. 1) meant that a lot of people could teach  OOP without paying for
compilers. Students did not notice the cost aspect of this and thought that C++
was the best available OO language.

Java found its way to the mainstream for two reasons 1) the compiler was free.
2) a better C++. Se above paragraph for how this works for 1). Reason 2) means
that people have a hard time getting C++ code to work. Some claim that it takes
longer time to get C++ code to work than the equivalent C code.


>Historically OS were written in assembler. Then people started to use C
>and they don't seem to be inclined to change that. You can call it
>historical, I will call it practical.


Assembly language operating systems are the exception and have been that for
quite a long time. The last 20 years people have probably done most of the
operating system work in C, but also Ada, C++, Modula-2 and various Pascal
dialects.


>If you throw away fairly high level stuff of Ada then it might not be so
>much better than C++. Why bother learning it and convincing management
>to use it?


Because it saves time. Lots of time. See the "Interesting Ada article" thread
in comp.lang.ada.

Greetings,