Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use

[Charmed Snark <snark@cogeco.ca>]

Nasser M. Abbasi expounded in news:hp95j8$i29$1@speranza.aioe.org:

> I was browsing the net for scientific software written in Ada, and
> came across this strange statement:
> 
> http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node7.html
> 
> "Scientific programming languages
> What is the best high-level language to use for scientific
> programming? 

Just asking "what is best" in any selection process
is going to be contentious except for the simplest
of things. Somewhat like asking "what is the best
laptop?" Too many inputs to consider.

> This, unfortunately, is a highly contentious question.
> Over the years, literally hundreds of high-level languages have been
> developed. However, few have stood the test of time. Many languages
> (e.g., Algol, Pascal, Haskell) can be dismissed as ephemeral computer
> science fads. Others (e.g., Cobol, Lisp, Ada) are too specialized to
> adapt for scientific use. 
..
> The remaining options are FORTRAN 77 and C. I have chosen to use C "
> 
> I find this strange, because I think Ada can be the best programming 
> language for numerical work.  So, I do not know why the author above
> thinks Ada is "too specialized to adapt for scientific use".  

Surely he expanded on this? How is it too specialized (in his
opinion)?

> Is there
> something in Ada which makes it hard to use for  scientific 
> programming? 

I recently tried to introduce a co-worker to the fact that
Ada is free and easy to install (cygwin gcc-ada) yada yada.

He started reading a couple of free online (PDF) books and
said his eyes glazed over and that he has no further interest. 
I suppose things might be different if there was a job market
for that skill here (Toronto). So that factor seems to be one 
important reason for some folks.

Library support would be another factor, I would think. People
don't want to become experts in interfacing to C (for example).
But as I do more and more of this, I am finding this to 
be less of an issue. Maybe a good "The Art of Binding [GNAT] 
Ada" document would help people with this. 

I do feel that Ada does require you to "engineer" your 
project more, which is a good thing. But this is something
that some folks seem to dislike. It probably impacts the
inexperienced programmers the most. This is the very
crowd that needs to be won over.

Otherwise, it sounds as if the author has too quickly
dismissed the language, without much familiarity in it.

> The main problem I see with Ada for scientific use is that it does not
> have as nearly as many packages and functions ready to use output of
> the box for this, other than that, the language itself I think is
> better than Fortran and C for scientific work.
> --Nasser 

One huge improvement I see in Ada-2005, is the built-in
inclusion of Ada.Containers. Having them "included" saves
me from having to instruct downloaders of where and which
version of the Booch components (or was it Charles?) etc. 
Having them included means that my project should always 
"work" the same, (in theory at least) regardless of the 
version of the compiler used.

I am making big use of these containers in the rewrite of
my basic interpreter project. I have got far enough along
now to believe that this is a very practical language 
change. I love the higher level of abstraction without
having to forego "repesentation" when it is required.

My only worry remains on compiler portability to HPUX, 
Solaris and AIX. But at this point, I am going on faith
that this will not be a huge open source problem 
going forward. It is encouraging to see the results of 
gcc-ada making it more universally available, and 
hopefully increasingly well tested.

I feel that the benefits of an Ada rewrite now seems 
to outweigh the risk of compiler availability.

One beauty of open source is that I don't have to 
justify the rewrite.  But I could easily do that, 
as the design is much improved now (I also expect
a big performance improvement later). Rewrites allow 
the lessons learned to be applied and Ada is also a
big factor.

It's funny how I got started on this rewrite- it
was the farthest thing from my mind in January. I was
starting to think about threads and matrix operations 
that might benefit etc. The Ada tasking model came
into the thought process at some point. So now I'm 
looking forward to designing that into the 
interpreter when it gets further along.

Just my own nearly at par $0.02 Cdn.

Warren