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,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-03 01:57:37 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? Date: 3 Jan 2003 01:57:37 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.219.89.90 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1041587857 20819 127.0.0.1 (3 Jan 2003 09:57:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Jan 2003 09:57:37 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32481 Date: 2003-01-03T09:57:37+00:00 List-Id: "Marin David Condic" wrote in message news:... > Maybe that's part of why there was/is a lot of resentment toward Ada. It > walked in the door with a mandate and everyone had big investments in other > things and the feeling was "This is going to cost me truckloads in > discarding my existing investment and for what? An uncertain 'technical > advantage'? Why are they trying to make my life harder?" It walked in the door with an overly broad mandate and almost nothing else. The compilers were buggy. The debuggers were a joke. Tasking was useless except on an Ada RTOS. Bindings to system facilities were compiler-specific. Without function pointers, binding to a GUI was nearly impossible. Work that could be done in hours in C suddenly expanded to take several days. Most programmers with any breadth of experience quickly labelled Ada a non-starter. > > This is why Ada's best hope would be to attach itself to some new, emerging > technology where it doesn't have to displace existing technology and can > itself become the entrenched status quo. Barring that, it has to find some > groundswell of usage out in the hacker world so that there is some large > infrastructure of practical things in use that keep it afloat. LOL. Look at the languages that have been adopted by the 'hacker world' over the past fifteen years: C++. Tcl/Tk. Perl. Java. Python. Ruby. PHP. The drive is to do more and more while saying less and less. Safety is good, but expressiveness and compatibility with existing technology (i.e. the Web, relational databases, and GUI) are the real drivers. OO is still going strong, but functional programming is gaining mindshare. Compile-link-run is on the wane. Also, all these languages provide built-in associative containers. Arrays are fine for small embedded systems, but not very useful for database-driven text processing applications.