Re: GNAT for MS Visual Studio

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Steve" <nospam_steved94@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:YcCdnaCp_dEWKmLbnZ2dnUVZ_qqgnZ2d@comcast.com...
...
> > That is perhaps the main point in my slightly jumbled commentary: GUI
> > builders don't allow you to build abstractions. Using GUI builders
> > doesn't scale and doesn't promote reuse (of GUI subsystems).
>
> With the .NET framework you can create a base form and derive other forms
> from the base form.  If that doesn't promote re-use, I don't know what
does.

Whether that is really reuse depends on what you mean by "derive". If the
derivation is one-time (a copy), then there is little effective reuse,
because every change to the base would have to be manually reflected in the
copies. (This is the only kind of derivation I have seen in GUI builders,
admittedly I haven't looked at many.) And as you have pointed out, a system
that doesn't change is not very likely.

OTOH, what I want (and have done in some of my Claw programs) is to create a
dialog (could call it a form if you like) that takes parameters. In my case,
it was a name and a registry location. Thus, the dialog would work the same
way for each use, but get data (and have an appropriate title) from
different locations for different uses. It turned out that writing that
abstract GUI module by hand (once) allowed it to be used twenty or so times:
in GUI builder code. And of course fixing a bug in it will fix all of the
uses at once.

I could have used the GUI builder to create it, but I would have ended up
with twenty copies that would each have to have been changed for any minor
correction -- which hardly would have saved any development time.

...
...
> If the effort to develop a GUI interface takes days, weeks, or months.
> Careful design is critical.  The resources invested in development are
> significant, and it is important to get it right the first time.
>
> If the effor to develop the GUI part of the interface takes minutes,
careful
> design OF THE GUI is less critical.  The design of the business part of
the
> application is still critical, but since changing the GUI is trivial it
> becomes less importaint to get it right the first time.

But there is no possibility of the GUI taking minutes. You have to at the
very least type in the names of the labels for the controls/widgets,
possibly define some of the data types, etc. Only the very smallest GUIs can
be done in "minutes". (There is one exception: the direct conversion of a
record type into a dialog, which can be automated if you don't care about
the result apperance. But that only would work for very simple systems - no
menus or dynamism is possible for that.)

...
> In my programmers Utopia, a GUI Ada tool would magically appear.

You should say "an Ada GUI tool THAT I FIND ACCEPTABLE", because of course
there are many Ada GUI tools out there. You said you tried them and didn't
like them, which surely is a reasonable opinion, but you should at least
acknowledge that others may find them quite useful.

> People (like me) who constantly experiment with different development
tools would
> try it and discover the wonders of Ada.  The market share of Ada would
grow,
> Ada vendord would thrive, and Ada would gain mainstream acceptance.

My experience in the Ada business suggests that no single 'X' could be a
magic bullet that would increase the acceptance of Ada. If you actually
tried to make 'X' available, by the time you got it done, the world would
have moved on. (i.e. Claw). If there is any magic way to increase Ada usage,
it would be to get ahead of the curve on something (multi-core comes to
mind: us Ada people have been doing that sort of programming for 25 years)
and market it for all it is worth.

But my personal, cynical view is that Ada cannot really succeed, because few
are really interested in doing things well. (IMHO, that's what's Ada is
really about, even if we don't always get that right.) Most only care enough
to hack something out to get by. And Ada will never be about hacking
something out.

Of course, there are enough people who do care about doing things well to
keep Ada around. But it probably will remain a niche language.

                               Randy.