Re: Would you use Ada more if...

[kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

"Marin D. Condic" <not.valid@acm.org> wrote in message news:<ajj0hq$f6$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
> One of the things that hurt Ada in the early days was the fact that for even
> rather terrible compilers with no surrounding tools, you were being asked to
> pay megabucks for the privilege of using them at all. This was happening
> while people were able to get inexpensive Pascal compilers and those with
> Unix got C free of charge. (Well, O.K., "bundled in with Unix" so whatever
> you paid for the system included some payment for C. But the point was you
> didn't have to go beg your boss to spend a hundred thousand for a compiler
> and the custom hardware to run it on.)

This was definitely a large factor that slowed adoption of Ada. 
Another
major factor was (and still is) the difficulty of using Ada to write
typical desktop applications.  As late as 1988 there still was no
standard binding to
POSIX services nor to X-Windows, and Ada-83 didn't even provide a
portable
way to write such a binding.  And of course the infamous inability to
pass
functions as arguments made event-driven programming nearly
impossible.
So even though Ada-83 was a much safer language than C, the startup
costs for typical (non-embedded) application development were
enormous.

> 
> Now, while Ada has certainly come down in cost to be competitive with other
> languages, it still suffers in some respects for lack of nice integrated
> toolsets all available in a shrink-wrap package on the shelf at CompUSA.
> Things are getting better and more/better integrated toolsets are becoming
> available or are in the works. You still won't see Ada standing next to the
> C/C++/Java/Basic/etc. development kits on the shelves at computer stores...

I don't think an IDE is all that important.  New languages (e.g. Perl,
PHP, Python, Ruby) have appeared and gained a fairly large following
without an IDE.