"is ada dead?" A challenge for all of us?

[Michael Erdmann <michael.erdmann@snafu.de>]

Such question is always creating the wish in me
to prove that it is not true, but my experiences
with open source projects for Linux makes it
more and more diffcult to prove this.

If you look as the open source market which is
mainly driven by the commonly available operating
system (e.g Linux) you will find that C, C++ and a lot
of other lagnuages are mutch more dominant then Ada.
Typical for this situation is e.g. the fact that most
of the Linux distributions claim to support Ada, but
the compiler is in fact  NOT part of the distribution.
Or how many applications of a typlical Linux
distribution are written in Ada? I think the answer
is about 0!

Any how the situation is not that devistating as it
sounds, because we got GNAT and several support tools
(eg. GLIDE, GVD...) to develop Ada SW for Linux.
But the effect of this effort on the open source market
is more or less not existing. There are still no major
open source Ada applications available!

I think the nagative formulation which is behind the
wisenheimer question  "is Ada dead" araises from such
a situtation because most of the peoples asking this
kinf of questions are doing this from a beginner point
of view. In most cases beginners have there first
contact  with programing using open source systems
such as Linux, where using C/C++ is considered as normal
doing without reflecting about it.

In order to overcome this situation, the interest of
the peoples asking such questions should be attracted
by interresting Ada written applications, in order to
change there attitude in such a way, that they at
least ask "..is Ada an alternative for my project?".

The challenge for us is to gather peoples in the Ada
community building such open source applications.

I think good starting point for this was and is the
ALT but without the "non commercial" effort of the
whole  Ada community, this initiative is doomed!

If the Ada community fails to meet this challenge,
then at least for the "open source/Linux"  domain the
language has to be considred in fact  as dead,
just because nobody needs Ada there!

This does not mean, that Ada is not itensively used in
other domains, but the open source and linux community
will not participate from there work and such questions
will araise again and again and.......


Regards
   M.Erdmann


PS:
I still think Ada is the better language, but
for my next open source project i considder of
not using it because of all the disadvantages it
has working on an isolated Ada island.