Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

W dniu środa, 19 marca 2014 00:23:57 UTC+1 użytkownik Shark8 napisał:

> The working-copy of the proposal is here:
> 
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwQVNNshW39cTXVOdWxQaVJ5WjA/edit?usp=sharing

Short version: this will fail.

Long version follows.

The proposal itself is fundamentally broken. You have to be aware that the biggest challenge for the Ada community is that of industry awareness. That is, most of the programming community never heard about Ada and those few that did do not see any reason to invest their time in it. The proposal for starting a significant project with public funding should focus on the rationale to explain why such an investment makes sense. But your proposal does not even attempt to do that. In fact, I think that the word "Ada" appears there fewer times than, say, "Delphi". Leaving aside my own relationship with Ada ;-), I see no reason whatsoever why I should give my money to this project.
You can see this problem in the following way: what will happen if you replace the word"Ada" with "Java" or "Scala" in this proposal? It will still be the same proposal and will still make as much (or as little) sense. Which means that this proposal is *not* about Ada. It is about your opinion about how IDE should look like.

Which brings us to another important flaw. The Ada (or Java or Scala, if you decide to replace words) programming language was *defined* in terms of text. It *is* a text-based language. If you think it is a problem, you will not fix it by reinventing the IDE. You have to redefine the programming language to break its natural ties the text format, but if you take the text-based language and try to work with it as if there is no text, you will fail. This idea (should I write IDEa?) is not even new, it was already practiced. I have had a misfortune to work with something like this in the past and it was utter crap that prevented programmers from doing their work efficiently, because the whole concept isolated the programmers from the existing tools. You will never solve all problems in the IDE, at best you will end up with something that is miserable at some selected aspect of programming work and that instead of enabling programmers to spread their wings, just pisses everybody off.

Which basically already started by fixing parts of the solution before exploring the problem - I'm talking about the precise selection of tools that you have proposed at the very beginning: Delphi + .NET + Mono + InterBase? Really?

No, REALLY?

I just fail to imagine Ada enthusiasts (and you need *a lot* of enthusiasm to make something as significant) running to contribute to this.

Sorry.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com