Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

I came across an article in a recent book by Joel Spolsky
with an article titled, "C++.  The Forgotten Trojan Horse,"
by Eric Johnson.   Spolsky's book is titled "The Best Software
Writing I," and it is published by Apress.

The article begins, "I find C++ interesting.  No, not because
my compiler can spit out an incoherent set of errors ... there's
a lesson to be learned about how it conquered an existing
community."

Johnson makes a good case for the insidious way that C++
found its way to dominance, not because of its superiority
as a programming language but for entirely different reasons.

A language achieves popularity or is ignored according to a
set of circumstances that are quite independent of what
any adopter of that language might consider as quality. It
would seem that quality is the last factor to be considered,
otherwise, C++ would never have become so dominant.

In more recent times, Java has campaigned for the role of
dominant language.   However, Java is even more bureaucratic
than Ada and even the simplest tasks are swollen into excessive
syntactic and structural absurdities.

More recently, I am seeing a trend away from C++ and Java
toward more "agile" languages such as Python and Ruby.  In
particular, Ruby seems to have captured the interest of anyone
who has looked carefully at it.  Python is wonderfully easy to
learn, and powerful in what can be done in a few lines of code.
I particularly like the fact that functions are first-class objects
since, for mathematical programming, I like to use functional
programming.    Ruby is the same in this respect.

What I have noticed, though, is that these easy-to-use languages
do not scale-up as well for really large software systems as C++,
Eiffel, and Ada.   Advocates of Python and Ruby disagree, of
course, but advocacy is not a good reason to believe them.  Also,
those who prefer Python and Ruby seem to have rejected the
importance of type-safety, at least in the literature.   As I read
their objections to type-safety, it is clear that they are framing
those objections in their experience with C/C++ (where type
safety is a hideous joke) or Java (where type-safety falls short
of what one would find in Ada).

So, the two languages that seem to best scale up for safety-critical
software are still Eiffel and Ada.

I have come to believe that C++ should always be the language
of last resort for any serious programming project.

Java has a place, but it is in a twilight zone that is often better filled
with Python or Ruby.   We could lose Java today and the world
would not be worse-off for it because Ruby would easily fill the
void.

What does a programmer choose as the language s/he uses at home
or for recreational programming?    Many in this forum choose Ada.
However, even those in this forum, as they discover Python and Ruby,
are probably enjoying the option of making small programs work
quickly and easily for everything from CGI to sockets.

This does not answer the question of why Ada is not more popular,
but one could pose an alternative question of why an error-prone
language should have ever become so popular.   Why would anyone
choose a language that is error-prone and expect an outcome that is
error-free.   Perhaps error-free software is not a goal.  Perhaps the
goal is to simply see how much code we can lay down in given period
of time.

Richard Riehle