Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[dvdeug@x8b4e516e.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On 3 Dec 2000 20:25:10 -0800, pete@nospam wrote:
>"We initially spent our focus on C, C++, Java, Perl, Eiffel, 
>Sather, SmallTalk, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal, and even Tcl."
>
>...
>
>"Then we dropped Ada because we couldn't find the right 
>libraries (apparently web server development isn't big with Ada)."
>
>--------------
>
>The above shows how importrant having standard libraries are.

Not standard libraries - the only language with huge standard libraries
on that list is Java. Eiffel, Sather, Objective-C, Pascal and Tcl (and
Smalltalk?) also have a paucity of library support; not coincidintly,
Eiffel, Objective-C, Pascal, Tcl and Ada all have decent support for
binding to C routines, at least in modern implementations. (I'm not
familiar with Sather or Smalltalk in this regard.) In some cases, it's
rather trivial to make a thin binding to a language. In others, it's
easier to just write in the language - since GUI's probably fall in the
second group, it's good that GTKAda exists. 

The big problem with a large library collection for Ada is that it takes
work to write and mainain those libraries. Notice that there is no free
implementation of a large part of the Java standard libraries. The Ada
community hasn't produced the right libraries for web server because
there aren't many people intrested in using Ada for web serving. Write
those libraries or bindings to those libraries, and maybe that will
change. If you chose not to, that's your choice, but apparently the
reward/work ratio is not high enough for the rest of us.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"(You see, the best way to solve a problem is to rigorously define it in
terms of other people's problems and then run away quickly.)"
   -- Roland McGrath <frob@debian.org>