Re: Ada Successor Language

[jm.tarrasa@gmail.com]

 
> AFAIK, there's no other "similar product" to that degree.

For me, Visual Studio is more stable and advanced that GPS or any Ada toolchain. I don't know what has Rational, but I find Visual Studio impressing.

>What is really interesting though is the statement "the price was quickly covered by the gains in productivity" -- this means the utility in ONLY productivity was enough to quickly pay for itself.

It looks that nobody can answer how much is a seat of Rational (and that is scaring). I've heard about 15.000$, but I can't confirm or deny it. If I'm doing projects of 10 millions dollars, 15.000 may be acceptable. If I'm doing 50.000 100.000$ projects, it is not.

So, maybe there is one of the answers of why Ada is not more popular. Only deep pockets and really big project can use Ada at its full power.

> are actually *different* -- this means that stupid things like 'style', "tabs vs. spaces" and other formatting elements are flagged as 'changes' completely apart from any semantic alteration. (This means that, within such source-control, there can be many "false positives" when you're looking at a change-log...

Formatting and styles *are changes*. In fact I make commits to correct style. Maybe editors should store source in a compact format and reflow it on the fly when you load the file, so, if you load with a classic editor a source of  Ada,C,C++, etc, you would only see a very long line. But until such editors become the mainstream, changes in formatting and style are not false positives, are changes that must be committed.

> 
> This sort of integration is something that isn't all that common in the places I've worked, which usually go with various individual tools.

Most IDEs integrate Editor (with completion, refactoring, jumping easily from a definition to another, stubs, help and a few things), some kind of files of project and a Debugger.

There are other tools (Version control, code analyzers etc) Does integrating such tools boots productivity a 20%? I don't think so. So, if the environment is a 5% of prize of the project or a 20% of the project, the level of integration may be secondary.