Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dan McLeran" <dan.r.mcleran@seagate.com> wrote in message
news:19b0e504.0409020718.40a57082@posting.google.com...
> There's also productivity concerns as well. One could do everything
> necessary to create great software with NotePad and batch files, but
> would you want to?

Why not? I still use the circa 1985 MS-DOS editor and batch files to
program; the Janus/Ada compiler provides everything else that I need (mostly
good program creating support). I haven't found a GUI editor yet that
matches the productivity of that old DOS editor. And compilation of the
entire project is just launching a single batch file (which usually contains
just a single command); all the GUI will do there is make it more likely to
lose the settings (because they're in some obscure settings file in the
registry or some remote directory, rather than in a batch file that gets
backed up daily with the source code...)

That said, I understand the many modern programmers are looking for GUIs to
hold their hands, and certainly we support that. Some things (like managing
projects) are rather confusing to do from the command line (of course, you
only need to do that once, so its not an ongoing pain).

> Regardless of language quality, (Ada is obviously a
> great language for building software), one needs tools that help
> generate great software. If the tools are any kind of hinderance, the
> language gets a bad rap.

Ada tools aren't a hindrance (and the rules of the language make building
programs trivial in any Ada compiler - compare gnatmake to the complicated
make scripts used to build C++ programs). The only problem is that they
don't necessarily give the comfort programmers are now expecting.

Of course, that's just part of a general dumping-down of programming. And
that's what managers want: they want any idiot to be able to build software,
so they can hire minimum wage people (or outsource) to do the job. But
you're never going to get anything well-designed and maintainable that way.

                            Randy.