Re: Point a beginner in the right direction? Cheap bare-board to run with a RTOS for running ADA

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

"Simon Clubley" <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote in 
message news:krjjr4$sqm$1@dont-email.me...
> On 2013-07-09, Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
...
>>> At this point, I'm beginning to think you are either trolling or just
>>> refusing to accept (for whatever reason) that there's a vast embedded
>>> market out there, outside of what you are used to, which could be a
>>> target for Ada.
>>
>> I started out creating tiny Ada subsets, and I've come to believe that 
>> those
>> do Ada far more harm than good. The only sort of Ada that can run on 
>> those
>> targets is an emasculated Ada that is likely to repell, rather than 
>> attract
>> people to "real" Ada down the road.
>
> Congratulations, you just guaranteed that Ada is never going to be 
> accepted
> by the majority with that attitude.

Ada never will be accepted by the majority, for the very simple reason that 
the "majority" are programming in Javascript and PHP, maybe Ruby or Python 
for big projects. Moreover, the "majority" doesn't give a damn about getting 
anything right, they'll just use rapid updates to change it until it sort-of 
works. None of which could reasonably be replaced by Ada.

> The way to get people interested in Ada is to expose them to Ada _before_
> they have made a large investment in other languages and have learned to
> work around the issues associated with those other languages.

But that's never been true historically, and it's even less true today. Back 
in the 70s and 80s, people started with Basic of one sort or another. A few 
lucky ones started with Turbo Pascal. Hardly anyone started with Ada (or 
even Java).

Now, people are going to start with Javascript or PHP, because what they're 
going to want to do is going to be associated with the web.

> You are still going to get people like myself interested (people who know
> those more mainstream languages, but also actively look for other safer
> languages), but the result of your worldview is that by the time many
> people are working on projects which you think are large enough to be
> considered for Ada use, then those people are just going to use the
> languages they are familiar with because they understand those languages
> and their issues even though Ada may indeed be a better fit.
>
> There's a hell of a lot of good stuff in Ada which deserves to be more
> widely used, but a number of people here don't seem to understand that
> their ossified attitudes turn away potential newcomers while those same
> same people are moaning about the lack of new people interested in Ada.
>
> I'm frustrated because I see places it would be _very_ nice to use Ada,
> but also see that some existing attitudes within the established Ada
> community are a major blocker stopping people trying Ada.
>
> The people who you might interest in Ada today have a very different
> experience in terms of hardware platforms and projects than what you
> seem to be used to. If you want those people to start becoming interested
> in Ada, you need to make Ada relevant to the way they work and their
> interests.

I spent 25 years of my life trying to get Ada more widely used by the 
masses. And lots of others at places like Aonix did the same. We have almost 
nothing to show for those efforts. Indeed, we seem to have more interest now 
rather than in the past now that everyone has given up those efforts. Which 
suggests to me, at least, that those efforts were counterproductive. Where 
AdaCore seems to have been more successful is in giving away free stuff as a 
side-effect of their paying work. But that of course presumes that there is 
paying work...

I could see a lot of value to an Ada-like language for smaller machines. 
Just don't call it Ada, and you'll probably have a winner. (So many people 
have a knee-jerk hate of Ada, even though they've never used it, it's bets 
to distance one from the name.) That's not going to do anything for Ada 
proper.

You don't like the view that I get from my 33 years of Ada experience, and 
that's fine. Feel free to prove me wrong, but if you fail, remember that I 
told you that you would fail. And don't expect me to encourage anyone else 
to waste their time on what I view as a losing endevour.

                                           Randy.