Re: Future with Ada

["Mark Lundquist" <no.spam@getalife.com>]

"rob@z" <rob_member@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:9v74ov014bc@drn.newsguy.com...
> In article <9v57u1$mfb$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin says...
>
> you guys are going about it all the wrong way.
>
> to make Ada more popular, you do not need to write yet another word
> processor in it (star office is doing pretty well anyway).
>
> Put the effort into reusable standard packages. there are so many
> areas where Ada has no standard packages to do things. Take Java
> libraries as an example.
>

I think you're right on the money there, Rob Z :-)

Java came along at a time when people who needed to write software were
looking around to see what were the viable alternatives for an
implementation language, and it seemed to them that the only things out were
C++ and Perl, and they said, "There has got to be a better way".  Then along
comes Java, which was way simpler to learn than C++ (though don't get me
wrong, it does have its share of confusing mind-rot, just nowhere near as
byzantine as C++'s), and unlike Perl you had a decent chance of being able
to figure out the meaning of your own code if you came back to it the next
day (let alone a year later).

But on top of these advantages, Java had a huge standard library of relevant
stuff! ("standard" enough for the purposes of this discussion -- please,
please do not anyone revive that lame thread about the True Meaning Of
"Standard".  Just don't).  Anyway, like I was saying... a huge library of
relevant stuff!  I think that is a key part of the appeal of Java, and I
think future languagues that want mainstream acceptance are going to have to
have big libraries.  People don't just want a language that facilitates
reuse, they want the actual reusable stuff, and they want it to be standard.
Languages will continue to target different points on the spectrum of
minimal-to-rich syntax (e.g. Ada and C++ have rich syntax, Smalltalk has a
simple syntax, LISP extreme minimalist syntax), but whichever way they go on
syntax, the library had better be there, or mainstream acceptance is a
non-starter.  The minimal-library philosophy is a failure for mainstream
languages.  The big library philosophy won (and if I may add, rightly so
IMHO).  I feel it will be best for Ada if the maintainers of the language
lose any hangups they may have over this (I don't know if they have any or
not), e.g. any lingering sensitivity to 80's criticism of Ada as "too big" a
language.  People are used to thinking of a "core language" + "standard
library", and they expect the library to be big.  They understand the
difference between that and a huge core language.

--

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