Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

[Ingo Marks <adv@region-nord.de>]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> Sigh.  So much promise, so small a result.  Given a complete community
> feedback loop and about a hundred times faster language change response
> time, Ada could be everyone's programming language of choice today.
> ...
> That comp.lang.ada isn't comp.lang.ada.* is a symptom of the whole
> mindset problem.  Unitary Usenet discussion groups are very
> characteristic of exactly one thing: _minor_ programming languages.
 
IMHO the major problems with Ada in the community are

- Who continues Ada compiler support in the future? Now we have some kind 
companies who provide good Ada compilers (commercial and for free). But 
someday they could say: "There is no more demand for commercial Ada so we 
have decided to stop further Ada support." What then? It is not enough to 
have a good dynamic Ada standardization process. It is also important to 
have continuing Ada compiler support in the future!

- Java and C# are much easier to learn. They are less expressive than Ada 
and suitable for small to medium projects. You can write software easier, 
shorter and faster - but more reliable? People have to know that Ada is 
pretty hard to learn (and you have to write more code) but makes your life 
easier afterwars (IMHO it's the same with Linux compared to Windows ;-). In 
bigger projects readibility of (self-commenting) code becomes a serious 
issue to consider. Studies show that development in Ada costs about half 
the time of development in C++. This is a quality of Ada that would make 
software developing companies curious surely if there would be a living Ada 
community and enough developers they could hire. I know that there _are_ 
companies out there who want to hire Ada developers but cannot find anyone. 
But they can get many Java developers so they decide to use Java in favor 
of Ada.

- Ada was not popular because a) it has the image of a 
general-purpose-"military only"-language and b) most Ada compilers were way 
too be expensive to be affordable for the normal (hobby) programmer who 
wants to learn and play with Ada. Since there are free Ada compilers for 
everyone, the interest for Ada has raised and will continue to raise. Of 
course, addons like GNU Visual Debugger and AdaGIDE make Ada more 
attractive. Michael Erdmann and others are right when they say Ada needs a 
general purpose standardization process. Some people in comp.lang.ada are 
right when they say a very good incentive to make Ada attractive to newbies 
would be an IDE with the feeling and power of Visual Studio .NET.

Could Ada have the same history as Unix?

I remember earlier years when the press said that Unix would be on the way 
to die surely and it would merely be a matter of years when Unix will be 
replaced by Windows completely. Then Linux and the Open Source movement 
rised and suddenly Unix (its modern variants Linux, BSD, MacOSX) become 
more and more popular. One reason for this is that the hardware was getting 
better and better and suitable to have Unix for everyone. 

In "ancient" years we had Cobol, Fortran, C and C++. In earlier years 
Visual Basic, Perl and PHP were very popular languages, but now more and 
more people realize that these languages are not suitable for bigger 
projects. That's why Java became popular. It's a polished version of C and 
C++ and requires little learning for C++ converts. MS realized the success 
of Java and decided to copy the Java framework and make their own version, 
together with C#, a polished version of Java. So for the last years we can 
see a "downgrade" from pretty complex popular languages like C and C++ to 
lightweight languages like PHP, VB etc., recently followed by an "upgrade" 
trend to more powerful languages (Java and C#). Several people are still 
not happy with Java and C#. They try other languages (Python, Ruby, 
functional languages). Here I see a chance for Ada to become more popular. 
Software becomes more and more complex, and this raising complexity is the 
area where readibility becomes more important and which Ada fits well.

Linux gained its success because of its good word-of-mouth recommendation. 
I think Ada needs the same.