Re: Ada for a programming newb.

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

Luke A. Guest wrote:
> 
> Forget about about functional/logic programming languages, it's generally
> really strange people who *get* these. They're too odd - i.e.
> mathematical/formal, which isn't as natural as "normal" programming
> languages.

I disagree.  It is true that most functional languages are stuck in an 
academic hole, largely because academics get carried away with how nice 
Factorial looks or the aesthetics of the typing system  (Scream "WTF 
else can you do with it?" get's tales of how it elegantly expresses the 
generation of Fibonacci numbers... wow! ;) ).  That's a shame, there are 
a few functional languages out there that could be used for building 
complex applications, it's just no one bothers writing real apps in 
them.  No one bothers writing real apps in them because there are no 
libraries aimed at real apps.  No one develops libraries aimed at real 
apps because they don't develop real apps...

Erlang is a very good functional language, which has a distributed 
programming model easier to use than Adas'.  If it had gui libraries I'd 
probably use it a lot more than Ada, but they're all old and people 
haven't updated them.  Erlang is used a lot for other things though, 
especially in the communications sector (where it was born, not some 
Academic Factorially Challenged research project).


Chris