Re: New IEEE Language Popularity Ratings

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> > Their perception is that Ada is a very large, extremely difficult 
> > language with an impossible learning curve. 
> 
> And C++ isn't?

> C++ is enormous and complicated. I don't believe anybody
> knows it all.

This is not a convincing argument. First, nobody knows the whole of Ada, either - even the experts on this group occasionally get into troubles with some language corners and with each language edition, there are more and more of them. Second, in embedded and safety-critical systems it is an established practice (sometimes even a requirement) to use a language subset, the more constrained the more critical the system is supposed to be. This applies to any language and if you get any strict coding standard, the language subsets are comparable in their size and learning curves.

In other words, it does not matter how dirty or difficult is C++ in any of its corners that is not going to be used in the project anyway.

Another point worth noting, especially in the embedded industry, is that hardware vendors heavily push C to their customers in terms of compilers, IDEs and HAL libraries. Go to any ARM vendor website and see what they have. It is not surprising that engineers coming to the market automatically fall into the trap... and stay there, as the potential advantages of Ada are not obvious if not backed by existing references from the hardware vendors. Consider that many people in this business are hardware (electronic) engineers who are new to programming, not the other way round.
Without support from hardware vendors, Ada will have a very difficult time getting any attention.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com