Re: Adaforge?

[Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

Hi  Riccardo

I strongly support your suggestion. I am not attacking Adacore or the efforts of others but there are several things that might be frightening off newcomers to the language and your proposal might really help offset this.

As someone new myself, I have been worried as to why:

-Many Ada sites have a circa 1995 look to the them

-Many of these sites talk about Ada 95 furthering the outdated fears

-A private company seems to be the centre of the Ada and profit has to 
be their goal 

-Many of these sites have dead links


If we had an AdaForge site that was/had:

-A modern look and feel
-Highlighted projects that were not mission critical/military
-Highlighted Ada's usefulness on multicore machines
-highlighted a not-for-profit effort
-highlighted projects that were mixed with other languages
-highlight the open source compiler


and linked to current resources like books, tutorials etc, it would dispel some of the fears. One thing that helped me overcome by early concerns was the fact that Ada is used in long term projects and projects just launched like the 787 plane. Even if all the Ada libraries die off the GNAT compiler should be maintained for quite some time, perhaps 20+ years ?

If we posted information like this on the home page it might help stop the FUD.

I don't consider myself much of a graphic designer but I would be happy to hack together a static site that could generate discussions about the look and feel of the site to come. Nothing would have to be accepted into the new site.

LuaForge also has a lot of projects in various states of usefulness too. They used Perl for their first LuaForge but it broke. Now they are using a Sputnik backed site:
http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/

It's written in Lua. We might have to use another language to drive the site as Ada doesn't seem to have much of a following in the web space. Perhaps later we could redo it with an Ada backend later.


Anyhow, thanks for bring this up! -Patrick