Re: Weakness of Ada is expensive / security / etc. ? Anything else?

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

> I know popularity shouldn't be a point, but the lack of popularity drives to lack of tools, libraries...

It is only a part. The vendor focus for Ada is in a niche where the tools are either present or they provide all that is needed, So no R&D is focused outside of it for tools except a few open source volunteers, many of whom have left, or reduced contributions, because they feel snubbed by license games that drive down the popularity of the language and greater usefulness of their contributions. (As an example, I only chose Ada in the end for Gnoga because I wanted a last ditch effort to help Ada from become a completely obscure language as the current business models are set to do and the closing up of SigAda efforts, etc. but if I had written Gnoga in Python for example it would make a massive impact and quickly.) 

> That's a weakness unless it is a niche and very specialized language. And as far as I know Ada is supposed to be general purpose language. 

Yes, but small minded thinking is that preventing Ada's wider use will make the niche where it is used more valuable. In the big picture interest in Ada for general purpose use has resulted in its reduction in education environments and over the course of time the niche use will continue to disappear completely since other general purpose languages are attacking that same niche for business as well.

> I don't know how it works with non-PC. But, unless you go for GPL, commercial Ada is really expensive.

No, FSF GNAT works well for professional large projects. Although if large enough you will want as with any language and tool you use support which AdaCore offers at a very reasonable for market rate.
 
> If you think  not in the compiler alone, but in a framework, a framework to work properly with Ada compared to frameworks that use other language, Ada is expensive, really expensive and, leaving aside the compiler, much poorer.

You'd have give specific examples, but Ada is not that far behind in most areas and ahead in others (like Gnoga :)

> GPS is a good IDE but not near Delphi or Visual studio, but prices are.. well.. for deep pockets.

They are different products and just comparing what is the same you will find Microsoft support is not so cheap and Delphi is outright ludicrous in price. (Actually who in their right mind would use Delphi over Lazerous and Free Pascal today anyways and if you are smart you'd use Gnoga over either of those :)

David Botton