"Jean François Martinez" wrote in message news:e8521a43-2bbf-4970-a17b-b585d021f235@googlegroups.com... >On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 9:36:47 PM UTC+2, David Botton wrote: > >. >> >> Things would have been so different had Ada not missed its window of >> opportunity with a syntax more familiar to >>developers and investments >> in bindings and interfaces been made. >> >> David Botton > >The problem was not syntax. The problems were: > >1) Being produced by the eeeeeeeeeevil DOD. That meant politically >correct people shunned and disparaged it Certainly true for some. >2) Missing the PC revolution. When everyone was learning C/C++ with 100$ >Turbo C either >there was no Ada compiler or it was completley unaffordable for someone >paying from his >own pocket. Thus the loads of Windows software were written in C/C++ Janus/Ada cost $99 for MS-DOS during this period. By the time Windows came out, Ada was already far behind and it really didn't matter (although both ObjectAda and Janus/Ada were available for under $500 for Windows). (The Meridian compiler and other competitors of ours also had Ada compilers with similar pricing during the MS-DOS days.) Ada didn't quite compete with $29 JRT and $49 Turbo Pascal, but those are not C either. So your premise here is very flawed. >3) To miss the object train. Yup. > In the crucial 1985-1995 years when you had to be a object-oriented or > die Ada > wasn't. That and number two meant employers found it was far easier to > recruit C/C++ > programmers than Ada ones. Of course, this was mainly because people using C++ first got useful modules that way, and they confused modularity (of critical use) with object-orientedness (less useful). But that was a hill that Ada could not climb, even if we were right. >4) Last but not least being a disaster at marketing. Couldn't argue with this, although the example makes no sense. > Look at the K&R book. It is a delight to read with plenty of attractive > little examples and exercises who make the reader feel smart (today I > would call many of them demagogic like the infamous one: "while > (*dst++=*src++); -- No longer sure about the syntax) the Ada books were > booooooooooooring. Look at the the Barnes one. If you skip the > introduction you will have to read a gazillion pages about types before > there is some action (instructions). That meant many potential users > leafed through it and discarded the book and the language, then they > leafed through the K&R and went for it. I never, ever recommended the Barnes book to anyone in those days for that very reason. (Sorry John. ;-). But there were dozens of Ada 83 books and no one had any reason to depend on a dry one. Indeed, we (RR Software) even had our own Ada 83 book, and it's nothing like the Barnes book. For Ada 95, the best book was Cohen's "Ada as a Second Language". It's too bad that he never updated it (he'd left the Ada world by then). Even today, you surely don't have to use John's book (it made my legs get numb when I tried to leaf through the copy he gave me last year - at least it didn't cause me to go over my baggage allowance when returning home!). I recommend "Ada Distilled" (which has the advantage of being free, too). >Out of competition: Perhaps because Ada is a language for senior >programmers. I'm not sure why you consider this "out of competition". I think this is the main reason: Ada is for people who want to write correct, working programs. It's not for hacking (although some of use can be pretty effective hacking in Ada), it's certainly not for prototyping, and so on. So it never was "sexy", and it's not really intended to be fun (unless you have a very weird sense of fun like mine!!). Randy.