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-Thread: 103376,c1400b61b3f80c1e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: svaa@ciberpiula.net Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Are there noticable differences in Ada acceptance by country? Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:55:05 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <87d4pr6413.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <47e0fc15$0$89167$157c6196@dreader1.cybercity.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.103.34.225 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1205956505 11741 127.0.0.1 (19 Mar 2008 19:55:05 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:55:05 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=80.103.34.225; posting-account=yPsdvgkAAADGfcYDd3foYffwSx3YiYnu User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20492 Date: 2008-03-19T12:55:05-07:00 List-Id: > I don't believe the language itself is to blame, as it's not a bit > harder or more difficult to learn than any other language. > There are two main reasons to learn a language by your own decision: a) It's a mainstream language (or at least everybody is talking about it) b) it has a special feature (the language itself or the framework) A common answer to beginners in this group is "Before trying multitasking you should learn the basis of the language, types, scope, limited types, etc". It is a wise piece of advise, but it also should give us a clue of what catches beginners's eyes: Multitasking. Sometimes I think that a lot of beginners browse the index of any Ada tutorial like this: "types..., if..., loops... function... I/O,... packages, ...tasks... tasks? protected objects? what's this? wow It is great. Their concepts are really clear, much clearer than signals up and down, threads etc. Let's try to do X... let's see what is the syntax of a 'for'." Ada lacks of a a good IDE (please, don't mention GPS), libraries and tools. Besides Gnat, any Ada compiler is expensive, really expensive, including Gnat pro, compiling with gnat is slow (no matter it does more things that other languages). Most of features are found in other languages as well more or less. But multitasking... Ada brights on multitasking. If you want to advocate Ada, show how wonderful it is for multitasking, don't talk about long-term maintenance, safety, less bugs, software engineery or things like that. Multitasking is the word. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of simple software that needs multitasking, and not many people has the skills for programing multitasking. So if no one talks about Ada, there is no compelling reason for learning it.