Re: Newcomers to

[Karl Stromberg <karlps@blander.no>]

On 2014-11-08, HerrDoktor <herrdoktor@fumanchu.com> wrote:
> I became interested in Ada a few years ago. I used Modula 2 in the 80s, 
> made and sold a few toolbox library even, then somehow I got on the 
> C/C++ path and was drifting with the flow over the years.
>
> More and more I got the feeling that this development was going the 
> wrong way, everything there was becoming more and more complicated and I 
> started to remember the good old days, when we made powerful programs 
> without having to deal with multiple levels of templates and multiple 
> inheritance and whatever makes live hell these days, and I started to 
> look around if there wasn't a language that was a bit more like Modula 2 
> and still actively supported by compiler vendors.

There is active projects for Modula 2 and Modula 3. Did you want Modula 2
or just something like Modula 2?

> I am also not a big fan of OO techniques and part of what got me 
> interested in Ada is that it is easier or perhaps more natural there, to 
> restrict OO programming to the absolute minimum and program more in an 
> imperative style which, in my view is more natural to the environment 
> we're working with (a machine with memory that contains instructions and 
> data and an ALU). I realize that my views are contrary to mostly all 
> language that are en vogue today, but I think programming can become 
> less complicated by looking backwards, not "forward" and using proven 
> techniques like Structured Development.

Agree. Fortran is a good example of this. Starting with F90 and continuing
they do a much better than average job of speccing out the language and
adding things that don't break old code, so everything you used to know
still works. And they add features in sane and sensible ways to give you OO
and many modern features you can choose to use or not use without sharp edges.

> Anyhow, I was able to write a fairly nice debug monitor system in Ada 
> after reading Barne's book and I was relatively impressed that Ada 
> enabled me to write a non trivial program pretty easy as a newcommer to 
> the language. Also, contrary to my experiences in C++, the program was 
> stable pretty soon without crashing with new errors long after I 
> finished it, which also impressed me.

Welcome to almost anything not C/C++ or based on it.

> Right now, I am stuck with C++ but I intend to use Ada more and more for 
> tools if possible. My next project will be a simple Text User Interface. 
> I used Ncurses for my monitor program, but I don't like the fact that it 
> is pretty complex to compile on Windows with MinGW and GPS installed 
> parallel. Also, it seems a bit slow to me with regard to output, so I 
> thought this would be a good pet project to take the next step with Ada.

A Canadian guy put out something like this many years ago. See here:

http://www.pegasoft.ca/main.html

Overall an interesting page with some nice Ada stuff for the "regular" guy
like me.

Karl Peter