Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

Michael Bode <m.g.bode@web.de> writes:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>
>> The example is wrong C, but the point is that such examples show little if
>> anything. Who is designing console applications today? What about "Hello
>> World" in X11, Windows API, GTK+ or similar with a requirement of some
>> definite look-and-feel? If we looked at C, Ada, Python code of that, we
>> would find all them far from being expressive.
>
> I'd say such micro examples don't show anything even if you make them
> GUI examples. A graphical "hello world" in Tcl/Tk would be:
>
> pack [label .l -text "Hello World!"]
>
> So why isn't  Tcl/Tk the most popular language today?
>
> One hint on why Ada isn't popular might be my own case. I'm an
> autodidact in programming (I'd never dare to call me software
> engineer). I learned programming at the age of 14 with BASIC, later I
> discovered Turbo-Pascal and liked it much better (I had to unlearn
> some quite bad BASIC habits).
>
> When I switched from DOS to OS/2 I found out what's so bad about
> vendor lock in: no Turbo-Pascal for OS/2. So I looked for a better
> standardized language and changed to C/C++ but never liked it
> much. 

Almost sounds like my biography :-). I'd bet you're +/- 3 years my age
(which is not going to be disclosed here ...).

> I've found out about Ada only 3 years ago on Usenet. Finally
> there was a (Turbo-)Pascal done right. Had there only been more
> advertising for Ada95 10 years ago that could have saved me years of
> C.

On factor that hugely contributed to the success of Borland's Turbo
line of products (at least in Germany) were the excellently written
manuals which documented anything -- from the language itself,
library, the stack layout and the interfacing with C and assembler. If
documents like this would have been available as a boxed set for, say,
GNAT in, say, 1990 or even 1995, then the world would perhaps look
differently today. 

As it is, as a hobbyist, you still have to collect stuff from all over
the internet (libraries, documents and some stuff is really not
documented at all). And I still think that making it easy for
beginners (people who learn their first language and don't know much
about operating systems, linking and how all that fits together) is
absolutely necessary to achieve popularity.

In some other post somebody asked wether it was a factor contributing
toward C's popularity that C was the language in which major
operating systems were written in. I don't think so. I suggest that
the availability of Quick C and Turbo C for 8/16-Bit micros was
perhaps a large if not the major factor.

Regards -- Markus