Re: Adaforge?

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Wed, 02 May 2012 00:56:02 +0200, Patrick  
<patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org> a écrit:

> As someone new myself, I have been worried as to why:
>
> -Many Ada sites have a circa 1995 look to the them
>
> -Many of these sites talk about Ada 95 furthering the outdated fears

Ada 95 was a major event for Ada, that's the reason why. This ended with  
many people discovering Ada is worth, and with multiple personal  
initiatives to make people learn about Ada. Some of these initiative are  
not maintained any more, but are still there on the web. This does not  
prevent more updated sites to be there too, you just have to add them in  
your bookmarks. Google like long time standing sites, which seems to be  
reference sites for that bot. Another reason why these sites pops‑up  
during your web‑search, is that many topic covered by later Ada versions,  
was already covered by older versions. If you search the web about the  
famous Ada tasking model, there is no issue if you land to an Ada 95 page.  
If you search the web about the to‑be‑famous design by contract in Ada,  
you will land to pages with references to Ada 2012, because prior Ada  
versions did not have this. This may be a matter only if you are seeking  
for web pages about Ada in the large. If you land on an Ada 95 page during  
such a request, then indeed, this may be an issue.

> -A private company seems to be the centre of the Ada and profit has to
> be their goal

Which is a good thing, as it suggest Ada may value at least as much as a  
pound of potatoes. Further more, I feel AdaCore do more for Ada than the  
FSF do, even if I admit FSF as a role too. At least, you have more to wait  
 from AdaCore than from FSF here.

> -Many of these sites have dead links

Because Ada is there since long. The same with many sites about C++, many  
of them have dead links too, and this does not prevent people for learning  
about C++, they just avoid some page. You can't force these sites to  
disappear, nor you can force the creation of so many new sites so that you  
could shadow the old ones.


> If we had an AdaForge site that was/had:
>
> -A modern look and feel
> -Highlighted projects that were not mission critical/military
> -Highlighted Ada's usefulness on multicore machines
> -highlighted a not-for-profit effort
> -highlighted projects that were mixed with other languages
> -highlight the open source compiler

More easy to request than easy to do (especially if you assert profit is  
bad). I don't expect a miracle from an AdaForge or anything similar.  
Better a news site with references to existing projects, and there are  
already sites like this.


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University