From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ac39a12d5faf5b14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 11232c,877ba3d67e73c6c3 X-Google-Attributes: gid11232c,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-04-12 03:10:04 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsmm00.sul.t-online.com!t-online.de!news.t-online.com!not-for-mail From: Ingo Marks Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,misc.misc Subject: Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community Followup-To: comp.lang.ada Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:10:03 +0200 Organization: T-Online Message-ID: References: <3CB46975.90408@snafu.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Trace: news.t-online.com 1018606175 02 15717 Bd-7TPNbSuAjBh 020412 10:09:35 X-Complaints-To: abuse@t-online.com X-Sender: 340020534592-0001@t-dialin.net User-Agent: KNode/0.6.1 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:22413 misc.misc:6260 Date: 2002-04-12T12:10:03+02:00 List-Id: 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.