Re: Promoting Ada via facebook/google+ ....

[Jano <devnull@mailinator.com>]

Bill Findlay wrote:

> On 07/10/2012 23:06, in article
> 5071fcd3$0$6567$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net, "Georg Bauhaus"
> <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote:
> 
>> On 07.10.12 22:49, Niklas Holsti wrote:
>>> Ada advocates must speak very softly, I've found.
>> 
>> Could be an idea to let quality speak for itself, if it
>> can, and not at all emphasize the language, or drop its
>> name. Just mention the features and their effects as if
>> they were a matter of course in your daily work. Which
>> they might well be!
> 
> There are none so blind as those who will not see.
> 
> Over the yaers I've had some very odd responses to my infrequent Ada
> advocacy in other newsgroups, which usually amounted to little more than a
> positive mention and a rebuttal of the most blatant misconceptions.
> 
> One respondent dismissed Rational's longitudinal comparative study
> (presented in a scientific paper) as a likely fraud.
> 
> Another openly admitted that his company's software (in C) was of poor
> quality, but said that was irrelevant, because their customers bought it
> anyway.  It made a profit, so it met its spec as far as he was concerned.
> 
> Another boasted of his ability to write faultless programs without the
> need
> for any pesky automated checking.  It was merely a matter of being careful
> and working to a professional standard.  As proof he provided the URL for
> an
> selection of his exemplary C code.  I found errors on the first page.
> 
> Sometimes I feel ashamed to have been a part, however minor, of an
> industry that is so accepting of wilful ignorance, charlatanism and
> incompetence.

I'm the walking joke in my lab because of my (nowadays slapstick) advocacy 
of Ada. The situation is curious because in my college Ada is the language 
in Programming 1.01, and some later subjects like IA, Embedded and Real Time 
Programming use it too. However, there's no one besides me (that I know) 
that uses it at the PhD/Postdoc level.

Whenever the topic of languages arises (and it does regularly, since albeit 
they mostly use C++, they're also in love/hate with it) they look at me with 
an anticipating amused look, knowing that I'm about to climb walls in 
desperation about locks and multithreading[*] that is still years behind 
Ada.

As for the original topic, I follow the Ada questions in stackoverflow; 
there are Ada groups in LinkedIn and reddit... so there is some presence in 
the mainstream social sites, and I find that as Niklas Holsti said, 
advocating by giving example instead of words works best. These groups seem 
to grow (at a very slow pace).

Alex.

[*] Just last week it started with Java and synchronized methods. Sometimes 
I'm afraid that I rant without knowing the latest features of these 
languages that might have fixed something.