Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[chris <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

 > So what does Ada offer that will address some crying need out there in
 > ProgrammerLand? I'd bet good money it won't be "We changed String and
 > Unbounded_String to be the same thing..." I'd think it would have far
 > more of a chance to gain in popularity if the amount of developmental
 > leverage it provided were to increase - beyond what you get with C,
 > C++, Java, etc. It wouldn't hurt if Ada could identify some market
 > segment that is emerging and give that segment far more leverage than 
 > any other language. Tinkering with the syntax and semantics won't do
 > it.

In my opinion Ada's problem is the same as that faced by many other 
languages.  When you want to do something the tools aren't there or you 
can't find them!!!  (or they're not easy to install; my tolerance of 
dependancy depth goes to 1 easy to install lib, no more!  IME other 
people exhibit a similar tolerance).

Recently I wanted to take jpegs, (Windows) bitmaps and png images and 
use them as textures for OpenGL surfaces.  I could find no way of 
handling bitmaps in Ada out of the box.  Tonights task is to handle 
windows bitmaps!  Tomorrows task is to keep at the LibPng binding and 
implement a library to save/load images in the png, bitmap, jpeg formats 
and anything else.  One that is simple and portable.  I really need 
facilities for working with images!

A while ago it was scripting, I had to implement a binding to Lua to get 
it.  Before that it was something else, and I really couldn't be a***ed 
doing it!  Recently I've gone back to Uni; we'll get Java, C# and 
depending on which project I get, possibly C or C++.  The nice thing 
about any of those languages is I don't have to be a***ed to implement 
anything but the system at hand!

I'm seriously considering C++ instead of Ada, even though it lacks 
concurrency, just to get access to a wide variety of libs*.  It also 
doesn't help when (some of) the community seem more interested in 
discussing single assignment operators or unbounded/bounded strings than 
addressing the important issues!  In the end the world isn't gonna give 
a sh*t if sw uses "a += 1" instead of "a := a + 1", or the nature of a 
string.  It is going to care if sw works, development is productive and 
the tools to develop are there!

Languages become or remain insignificant when people using them argue 
about trivial or academic issues and things don't get done!  It happens 
with many functional languages, where the aesthetics of type systems and 
stateful computations are all that people discuss (apart from 
"factorial" or "fib").  And it's happening here...



Chris

*I have no issue with libs that are available!