From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,71d1fdde81c072f8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Preben Randhol Subject: Re: Computer Programming for Everybody? Date: 1999/09/13 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 524424024 References: <7rbkm4$pn6$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7ri1ls$1rf9@drn.newsguy.com> X-Complaints-To: usenet@itea.ntnu.no X-Trace: kopp.stud.ntnu.no 937223260 8302 129.241.83.82 (13 Sep 1999 11:47:40 GMT) Organization: ProgramVareVerkstedet NNTP-Posting-Date: 13 Sep 1999 11:47:40 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-09-13T11:47:40+00:00 List-Id: 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. 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. 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 [randhol@pvv.org] 0cwVim [http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/] -- vim editor