Re: An Ada Advice Inquiry

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1178448459.256329.28590@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> On 6 Maj, 07:00, <adawo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> we continue to see people making
>> decisions in favor of inferior languages such as C++.
>
> Of course, and don't expect it to change anytime soon.
>
> There is one thing that I miss in this discussion. You asked for
> "advice" on comp.lang.ada. What "answer" do you expect *here*?
> It's just about the same useful as asking on comp.lang.perl whether it
> makes sense to start a new project in Perl. Go and try.
>
My original inquiry was about whether any new projects are being
started in Ada.    I think the C++ people would be unlikely to have
an answer to that question.

What I have learned, from contributions to me inbox and comments
in this forum, is that a great many new projects are being started in
Ada.   As usual, quite a few of my correspondents have asked not
to be quoted/cited.

I have also had some "buyer's remorse" messages.   That is, more than
a few of those email messages have said how disappointed they are
with the decision to use C++ instead of Ada.  The C++ decision has
not been as sucessful as they had hoped, and there is some wishful
thinking that they would have been better to have stayed with Ada.
Now that the code is written in C++, they have to live with the agony
of C++ while longing for the ecstasy of Ada.       I suppose the
"grass is always greener" effect is a human trait that will endure for
as long as humans inhabit the planet.

I did send another email to my colleague yesterday summarizing the
comments from this forum and from the contributions to my inbox.
This morning (Sunday), I received a few more messages with similar
information.   Again, I have been asked not to cite or attribute any
of the information specific people.  Some of these contributors are
not corporate officers with official authorization to speak about the
projects they are doing.   Rather, they are worker-bees who are
speaking for themselves, and revealing information that might get
them fired.   Therefore, I am stripping attribution from those kind
of messages before providing it to my colleague, the person who
originally made the inquiry of me.

As to the suggestion that I make this inquiry of the C++ forums,
my experience is that the vast number of C++ users are woefully
ignorant about Ada.  This is certainly the case where I am currently
employed.   On the other hand, C++ is so obnoxiously ubiquitous
that a person who uses Ada cannot avoid C, C++, or Java.  In my
own case, I have to use C++, teach it in my classroom, and endure
its messiness on a regular basis.    The more I see of it, the more I
learn of it, and the more deeply I am required to spend time with
it, the more I realize how much better Ada is for most things.

That being said, I also have come to like Python for a lot of my
day-to-day programming.  Ada is not perfect for every project.
There are other languages that have great virtue for different kinds
of projects.   However, as nearly as I can tell, at this point in the
world of programming, C++ has outlived its usefulness for most
of the tasks for which it was once used.   It has become the close
equivalent of an object-oriented Assembler, forcing a lot of
programmers to focus on low-level concerns that ought to be
a marginal aspect of modern software engineering.

Richard Riehle