From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-10-03 14:46:12 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!elnk-pas-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!west.cox.net!east.cox.net!peer01.cox.net!cox.net!newspeer1-gui.server.ntli.net!ntli.net!newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: chris User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030925 Thunderbird/0.3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 22:51:28 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.98.236.164 X-Complaints-To: abuse@ntlworld.com X-Trace: newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net 1065217571 81.98.236.164 (Fri, 03 Oct 2003 22:46:11 BST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 22:46:11 BST Organization: ntl Cablemodem News Service Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:176 Date: 2003-10-03T22:51:28+01:00 List-Id: 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!