Re: a good book to start with?

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

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"Olivier Laurent" <oliderid@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:8d63e22a.0310080218.23ffb8be@posting.google.com...
> > Hi Olivier
> >
> > I recommend you visit my website (http://www.adaworld.com) and take a
look
> > at the Learning Center / Free Books section.  My first link there is a
pdf
> > file called Ada Distilled (Make explicitely to teach Ada to C++
programmers.
> >
> > As for GUI you can have a look at http://libre.act-europe.fr/GtkAda/ for
a
> > good GUI library.  and for a tool that uses it, visit
> > http://glade.gnome.org/
> >
> > Hope this puts you one the right track :-)
>
> Thanks St�phane. Impressive web site!
>
> You look like an ADA evangelist ;-), maybe you can help me:
> Is ESA (European Space Agency) still based its core software
> developments on ADA? I read somewhere (on emits.esa.int I think) that
> JAVA is emerging as the next ESA's standard language?
>
> Olivier

Thanks :-)....I try...seems I'm doing something good...:-)  "Reverend Ada
has spoken". ;-).

I heard that too about Java and the ESA.  I'm not one to bring down other
languages for the good of other languages.  But I can't help but wonder how
precise they want (or need) they realtime applications  if they are
considering Java.  Sure Java has a form of Task and Task control mechanism,
but well at last on my PC time differencial benchmarks I've done (for a
music application project of mine, so nothing mission critical per se
however music is all about time precision.  Ada came out much more stable
and regular than java as far as timelaps calculation and the execution of
tasks during the waiting of delays (as in to end a note or play the next
note on a track or multiple tracks.

So Precision wise if it's what they want, they might want to do some serious
benchmarks.  Depends on why they need it I suppose.

Me well I simply prefer Ada for more than one reason.  Mainly because it
still detects more errors at compile time than Java can, which means that by
the time yoru code compiles, there's:
1. a much higher change it will run
2. a much smaller debugging time from the coding to the end of debugging
phase.

It's designed with software engineering in mind and as such offers many
advantage for large scale application development as far as a programming
language goes.

Dont get me wrong, C++, Java probably have their specific place or they
wouldn't be what they are today (popular) but from what I'm seeing, I don't
think all the right reasons went into making them as popular as they are
today.  A lot of the reasons aren't based on language capacities, but on
sheer popularity (a lot of companies go with Java and C++ because other
companies went with Java and C++) that makes Java and C++ popular, but does
it make them better, as languages? I think not :-).

That was my most humble opinion :-)

-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com