Re: New IEEE Language Popularity Ratings

[Stu Hollander <s.hollander@ghrt.com>]

On 2016-08-09, Norman Worth <nworth@comcastNOSPAM.net> wrote:
> On 7/28/2016 9:05 AM, Alejandro R. Mosteo wrote:
>> On 28/07/16 16:58, brbarkstrom@gmail.com wrote:
>>> has a 2016 ranking of languages.  Top two are C, followed by Java.

That's because the two of the three most popular "operating systems" are
written in C and top one uses mostly Java.

> When I mention doing something in Ada, my very experienced peers 
> shudder.  They have never been trained in the language, and they dread 
> it.  Their perception is that Ada is a very large, extremely difficult 
> language with an impossible learning curve. 

And C++ isn't?

>They also feel it would be difficult to read, understand, and maintain.

And C++ isn't?

It's really quite the opposite. C is an unsafe language, C++ is unreadable,
error-prone and builds on C's worst attributes. Ada is readable, safe, and
maintainable and was designed (as opposed to C and C++!) from the beginning
to deal with large systems. It's unfortunate and we all realize it's going
to stay that way but people really missed out and continue to miss out by
not looking into Ada and other alternatives. They prefer to stay with the
broken tools they already think they know. The devil you know vs. the devil
you don't know. In reality the situation is quite the opposite of what most
people imagine. C++ is enormous and complicated. I don't believe anybody
knows it all. Those people are afraid of Ada? They're the ones who would
probably benefit from it and enjoy the refreshing change the most.

As you said the tools are not there. That is enough to kick Ada out the door
no matter how good the language is. If C and C++ had no libraries they'd
also be unusable...

> The battle reminds me a bit of the Algol vs. FORTRAN battles in the
>  1970s. 

I don't remember that because outside of academia nobody cared about ALGOL
and we all there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell FORTRAN was going to be
displaced. To some degree FORTRAN and Fortran are still hanging on. Not that
ALGOL wasn't an interesting language but it fell off the radar 40 years ago
and there hasn't been a sighting since.

Stu