Re: meaningfully/compellingly “advertising” Ada on StackOverflow

[John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>]

On Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 9:27:12 AM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> One thing to help Ada “cross the chasm” would be for each of the how-can-I-do-this-in-Ada questions posted here on c.l.a to also be posted in StackOverflow with (at least) the tag Ada. ...
> Plus the more times Ada is meaningfully mentioned in technical contexts on the WWW, the higher Ada that scores (directly or indirectly) on those perennial rankings of programming languages.  A quantifiable measure of success in this campaign would be measured by Ada moving up at least one position in any one (or all) of these popularity-of-programming-languages rankings that are always coming out (with usually C, Java, C++, and Javascript among the top positions in the ranking).  The goal is not to move Ada to the top five positions; the goal is move Ada from, say, position #22 to position #18.

I've been learning Ada recently for fun, and asked a couple of Ada questions on StackOverflow recently. The people who replied were really helpful.

Likewise, the Ada implementations on RosettaCode were both helpful to learn from and, back when I was visiting to look at something else, nice advertisements for the language.

I know that what follows below isn't the same, but it's related, so I hope you don't mind my mentioning it here: I came across this "Completely Unscientific Benchmark" where the guy seems halfway serious:

    github.com/frol/completely-unscientific-benchmarks

There was no Ada implementation, so I added one. It's quite a simple program: adding and removing ~10^6 nodes to a tree, and testing if the tree has a value. The Ada implementation I submitted is about as fast as the C++ implementation: he recorded it as 1.35x slower on his machine, but it still impressed him at the time as it was one of the fastest he had then.

I don't know much about Ada, and I basically implemented it by translating the C++ code to Ada, so it might be possible to improve the implementation. Things like that could be one way to improve Ada's reputation, and I'd be delighted to learn how I could have implemented it better.