Re: Computer Programming for Everybody?

[Preben Randhol <randhol@pvv.org>]

mitch@nospam.com writes:

| What we need is a book called 'Ada for dummies' and 'Ada in 21 days' to 
| help make Ada more popular. (I always wondered why they picked the number
| 21 days? what is so special about 21 days? why not 22 days?).

I think we need more Ada programs that are free and with available
source code. 

<my humble story>
I hadn't heard much about Ada before. I remembered
something back ing the Amiga days, but that was only a name for a
programming language, and I was doing assembly on the Amiga :-) After
that I jumped to C cause it was the next thing I learned about. Then I
wanted a object orientated language (not a scripting language like
Python) and I of course started with C++. But I never found the time
to really learn it an it was frustrating to try to program. I also
heard a lot of bad things about it so I asked for opinions on which OO
language to learn. I got some replies, but not many languages suited
my needs. Both Eiffel and Smalltalk didn't have any GTK bindings then,
but the Gtk bindings for ADA was in the making. I thenk started
reading Ada95, but I was turned off by the fact that I didn't get the
compiler (GNAT) to work on my machine and that Ada95 looked so much
like Pascal which I had to learn here the first year at the
university. I went back to C++, but got more frustrated and now a
couple of weeks ago I started looking at Ada95 again.

Why I went for Ada95:

1. I read (cannot remember where now) the philosophy about the
   verboseness of this language. The reader as the target not the
   writer. Made a lot more sense than the first glimpse I had at some
   code. 

2. That it seems to be safer. Concerning pointers etc...

3. That it looks much more consistent, and have less syntax oddities.

4. The GNAT compiler works perfectly (on linux) and it seems to
   compile programs much faster than C++ (I haven't tested much so it
   might not be true though)

5. There are now GTK bindings for ADA. [ OK I like, Linux, GTK and hope
   Gnome will be a nice desktop in the future :-) ]

6. That it looks more portable (not that it is a big issue for me,
   but it is nice)

So now I'm starting to make way in the text books and I like Ada more
and more.

</my humble story>

So I think that if there were more programs in the "free world"* using
popular and nice widget sets as GTK, more people would notice that
there is other languages than C and C++ too. I really like the 'Ada for
Linux effort' as it made it very easy to get started with Ada. Only
had to install some packages and that was it. 

To get more software engineers to use Ada, I don't now. But
to get universities and other schools to use Ada instead of C++ or the
hyped Java would be a starting point. I guess the problem is getting
teachers that know Ada though :(

* meaning with GPL and similar copyrights.
-- 
Preben Randhol                       iEmacs is my favourite editor<ESC>
[randhol@pvv.org] 	             0cwVim<ESC>
[http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/]                        -- vim editor