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From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Why is Ada considered  "too specialized" for scientific use
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2010 21:46:51 -0700
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Date: 2010-04-03T21:46:51-07:00
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I was browsing the net for scientific software written in Ada, and came 
across this strange statement:

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node7.html

"Scientific programming languages
What is the best high-level language to use for scientific programming? 
This, unfortunately, is a highly contentious question. Over the years, 
literally hundreds of high-level languages have been developed. However, few 
have stood the test of time. Many languages (e.g., Algol, Pascal, Haskell) 
can be dismissed as ephemeral computer science fads. Others (e.g., Cobol, 
Lisp, Ada) are too specialized to adapt for scientific use.

......

The remaining options are FORTRAN 77 and C. I have chosen to use C "

I find this strange, because I think Ada can be the best programming 
language for numerical work.  So, I do not know why the author above thinks 
Ada is "too specialized to adapt for scientific use".  Is there something in 
Ada which makes it hard to use for  scientific  programming?

The main problem I see with Ada for scientific use is that it does not have 
as nearly as many packages and functions ready to use output of the box for 
this, other than that, the language itself I think is better than Fortran 
and C for scientific work.

(the above quote is from a course on Computational Physics at University of 
Texas at Austin, may be I should write to the professor and ask him why he 
said that, but I am not sure I'll get an answer, my experience is that most 
professors do not answer email :)

--Nasser