RE: How come Ada isn't more popular?

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

Maciej Sobczak writes:
> Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> >> I treat it as an idiom that allows me to finally achieve the goal, but
> >> not as a direct support for the feature that would be most accurate.
> >
> > Fair enough, but then why are you here?
>
> I don't understand. Is the fact that I miss some language feature
> disqualifying me from learning more about the language? :-)

Sorry, that comment seems harsher than I intended. All I meant to say is
that it is pointless to complain about one of the fundamental design choices
of Ada (or any other language). It makes as much sense as complaining that
it is hard to write an imperative program in a functional language.

> > Ada is all about providing building
> > blocks that allow you to accomplish a purpose, rather than whiz-bang
> > features that provide the entire purpose in a neat but
> inflexible package.
>
> Is a direct support for constructors a whiz-bang but inflexible package?
> In what way?

Because there is no single concept of a constructor. You need at a minimum a
copy-constructor and a default-constructor, and then you still have
flexibility issues. Ada chose to decompose these things into their
constituent parts.

Yes, Ada does have a problem with composition, but that is a general
language problem, not one that is specific to constructors or any other
specific feature. It would be much better to fix that composition problem
generally rather than to bolt on more special features that do compose,
while still leaving the general case unfixed.

> > There are many examples of that: [...]
>
> Sure, but there are also examples of missing features.
> For every language there is at least one programmer that will miss
> something. I miss (for example) constructors in Ada.

You haven't clearly explained what the difference between a function and a
constructor is. When we (the ARG) looked at this problem, we eventually
decided (at least from an Ada semantics perspective) that there was in fact
no difference. Thus we decided that it didn't make sense to have a special
feature for the purpose. (That certainly was not where we started out when
considering the issues.)

                           Randy.