Re: Does Ada still competitive?

[anon@att.net]

No!

Ada is dying by a painful and slow death! Yes, there will always be a few 
that will try to play with Ada but the day of moving code to Ada is over and 
done with. Like, it was report here a few weeks ago, NASA is now pulling it 
Ada support. And most satellite and other companies went C in early 2000s.

One reason is the change to "Return by Type" from "Return by reference" 
which started around 2007.  The problem with "Return by Type" is that 
the "Generic package" must be compiled within the routine or package 
that uses it.  Which means the "Generic package" is a one application 
only so why use generic in the first place.  But companies like NASA 
over the years have created 1_000s of external "Generic packages" that 
are for multiple projects and at writing and compile time the "Generic 
package" has no concept of what type will be use. So the usage of 
"Return by Type" cause compiler errors on a massive scale on external. 
generic packages. This is one of many proof that Ada is not backward 
compatible. So, company like NASA are moving away from Ada to a more 
stable language that is 100% backward compatible like C. No rewrites 
on any package only compile, link and execute.


A second problem is that every year the ARG is moving Ada toward a C like 
language. An example is in Ada 2012, is functions now can use "in out" 
within the parameter list, such as

   function <name> ( <arg_1> : in out <type_1>; 
                     <arg_2> : in out <type_2> ) 
            return <return_type> ;

Which is classical C version of a procedure routine with the "return_type" 
being a error code. So, will the "Exceptions" and exception handler be 
next to be removed from Ada in 2020. That's a problem with existing Ada 
programmers, being that they may be forced to make 100s of re-writes 
to remove exceptions that no one want to do. And the ARG can not say 
for certain that exception will exist in Ada 2020 or after, until they 
vote on Ada 2020 RM sometime in 2020 or later.

A third is the "Not null" clause that are use in routine's parameter list 
starting with Ada 2005.  That cause introduces inefficiency error checking 
at the beginning of the routine that can not be truly optimized. This is, 
just like the C like "pragma Assert" which add very inefficiency code into 
one programs. 

There are others concepts that software division in companies like NASA 
or software shops do not like the direction Ada is going in because of 
the ARG.

Plus, the number of new Ada programmers are limited. Most small schools 
only teach languages that are under the Microsoft ".NET" umbrella or JAVA 
which mean Ada is not taught. And in large Universities the cost of a 
single class is too high to experiment just to learn a language that is 
being phased out by most programming departments.



In <2667883.6.1334114293790.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@pblw1>, Sunny <daetalusun@gmail.com> writes:
>Hi all!
>I like the programming language.
>But I saw a sentence on TOIBE index definition, it said that: "Ada is hardly used for new mission-critical systems anymore." Is that true?
>And does Ada still teach in university and used in works?
>Thanks!
>Sun