Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

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

"John McCabe" <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam> wrote in message
news:str7v39teoa2rielnfrivc290751v3g8uu@4ax.com...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
...
> >If you think this is ugly,
> >you should see the GUI distributed with Janus/Ada...it *is* a Windows 3.1
> >look, and it is nowhere is nice as this. :-)
>
> That would be interesting to see, but there aren't any screenshots on
> your website, and the main Janus/Ada 95 page hasn't been updated since
> 2001 according to the bit at the bottom.

Umm, our website is intended to convince people to buy Janus/Ada, not to
convince them not to. ;-)

The whole site is going to get an overhaul after the next release of
Janus/Ada comes out, but there isn't much point in updating it to show off
non-existent tools...

...
> >My understanding is that to write Eclipse plugins you have to write in
Java.
> >If I wanted to use Java, I wouldn't be here in the first place. If you
can't
> >program it in Ada, it isn't worth writing.
>
> Things would be much better if there was an Ada OS. Unfortunately,
> while you can use foreign language libraries in Ada, you still
> basically have to understand those languages and, sometimes, write in
> them.

Hopefully, you *don't* have to do this more than once per project, and the
majority of programmers don't have to do it.

...
> >I understand the market pressures, but on a practical basis, I don't
> >understand the big deal about bloated IDEs anyway. Everything that is
> >worthwhile in an IDE is language and compiler-specific anyway (debuggers,
> >error messages, syntax, symbol browsing, project management), so what can
> >this empty framework actually accomplish?
>
> Essentially it's a template, at least the Java development environment
> is. It provides a means for companies to produce a fully integrated
> IDE without having to go through the rigmarole of producing it from
> scratch. Much of the foundation is already there, you just have to
> provide your specific bit and plug them.

What rigmarole? With a decent windowing toolkit (or even with Claw ;-),
there isn't much to putting together a decent editing app. And the rest of
it is going to be very language- and implementation-specific. My
understanding is that that pretty much the entire Eclipse IDE resides in its
plugins, so developing them is just as complex as developing a whole IDE.
Moreover, you have to develop them in a subpar programming language (IMHO -
and in any event I don't know it anywhere near as well as I know Ada). So
what's the gain? It mainly seems to be a marketing checkbox to me.

> To some extent the way all
> the components fit together is fixed so, to the user, programming in
> one language is much like programming in any other. You have, however,
> ways in which you can provide very compiler specific information if
> you like, by producing views to display it. I think it's brilliant
> personally. My productivity would be improved if I were able to use
> purely Eclipse (I am working in a multi-language environment) because
> I would only need to learn to use one IDE.

Fine enough. But I'm really not very interested in multi-language
programming. Lest I appear to be losing my mind, let me explain a bit.

My experience is that a large proportion of bugs are in the interface
between Ada code and other language code. Moreover, those bugs cannot be
diagnosed by the compiler or its runtime system, so there is no real hope of
help. My hope is that Ada and Ada compilers will continue to get smarter
about detecting errors (it seems likely, and surely they are going to get
worse), and that is going to increase the difference in number of bugs in
the interfaces compared to the rest of the application.

In an ideal world, the entire application would be built in Ada, down to the
metal (running on MS-DOS in the old days was pretty close to that!), and all
of that checking could be applied to the entire app. (I do expect to see
full program compilation in the fairly near future.)

Now, I realize that it's unlikely that many of us are going to be able to
build all-Ada bare machines. (The fact that people have turned to using
real-time executives to provide the same services that Ada already does has
always mystified me; a bare machine Ada should do as well or better than
your typical RTOS.) But my preference is to spend some effort up front
wrapping any foreign code into the best designed Ada interfaces that you can
get, and then (hopefully) never look at it again. That was the main driving
reason for developing Claw, and that has worked out pretty well (could have
been better, I suppose, but that's always true).

Anyway, I *hope* I'm not crazy. I realize I could make more money by giving
up on building decent programs and following the herd. But I hope that there
still is some value to doing the right thing. (Based on yesterday's election
results here in Wisconsin, it appears that there isn't. Maybe I'm just
old-fashioned in that way.)

                                  Randy.