Ada culture & pictures.

Ada culture & pictures.

[chrismiller677]

Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?

Think about it - the whole Ada culture seems obsessed with text. Page
after page after page of boring text.

Perhaps it all stems from the text based Ada Language Reference manual?

Some examples :

 -  the 3rd instalment from John Barnes on www.adacore.com concerning
access types. 28 pages, no pictures. Likewise for the other
instalments. His iconic Programming in Ada series and High Integrity
Software book is similar.

- www.ada-auth.org. Home page, no pictures, all text. In fact I
couldn't find any pictures on the entire Web site. (Can anyone else?)

- www.adaworld.com. A rotating globe but otherwise all text.

- www.adapower.com. No pictures.

- www.adacore.com. OK, they did manage a screen, book & logo. It's a
start I suppose.

- Concurrency in Ada, Burns & Wellings. 390 pages, about 20 diagrams
many of which are similar.

- The holy grail. Ada 95 ref manual  & Standard Libraries. 543 pages. I
gave up looking, the closest I came was the hierarchy of language-
defined classes in section 3.2 12.

The point is that the Ada community has complained for years that,
despite the language being technically brilliant, that no one uses it.

Perhaps we are just putting our audience to sleep.

Maybe Microsoft were on to something when they chose "Visual" basic.

And so, with this textual note, I sign off...

Chris Miller.

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Pascal Obry]

Chris,

[lot of interesting troll's information]

> And so, with this textual note, I sign off...

Do not and contribute your graphic works! That would be far more helpful
than sending this kind of message :)

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|              http://www.obry.net
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key C1082595

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Martin Krischik]

chrismiller677@hotmail.com wrote:

> Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?

Well, you are invited to rectify the situation. At WikiBooks we have am Ada
tutorial where anybody can contribute to. Currently we have only one
picture for the type system but we would love to have more pictures.

So please come over and help us make the greatest (online) Ada book ever.

Martin

Links:
    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming
    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types#List_of_types

-- 
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Gautier Write-only]

chrismiller677@hotmail.com:

> Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?
> 
> Think about it - the whole Ada culture seems obsessed with text. Page
> after page after page of boring text.

The whole culture?
No, there is a small corner of resistance - as a modest example, see the
2nd link below and the pages it links to!
...

> And so, with this textual note, I sign off...

Yeah, your complaint (a dark picture!) is plenty of text everywhere -
not even a single ASCII art - I had to read it diagonally.
[Just kidding, and long life to pictures!]
______________________________________________________________
Gautier     --     http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/index.htm
Ada programming -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Georg Bauhaus]

chrismiller677@hotmail.com wrote:

> - www.adacore.com. OK, they did manage a screen, book & logo. It's a
> start I suppose.

Try this,
http://www.adacore.com/aa_lectures.php

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Nasser Abbasi]

 

<chrismiller677@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1126512087.368854.121520@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?
>
...
> Chris Miller.
>

May be because it takes a little more time to draw diagrams?

btw, I use Microsoft Visio software to make diagrams. It is really 
easy to use and very powerfull and one can generate very professional 
looking digrams with it. I recommend it. I tried many others, but 
Visio is simply the best. (I have no relation with MS, and do not even 
own MS stocks)

Just as an example, this little report below (not yet finished btw) 
has all the diagrams done with Visio, it took me less than 10 minutes 
to draw them all. I also use Scientific word (great program btw) to 
generate Latex and HTML from it.

http://12000.org/my_notes/PID_ode/HTML/PID.htm

I agree with you, pics and diagrams makes a document more easy to 
understand.

A pic is worth a thousand words :)

Nasser 

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Rob Norris]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:53:50 GMT, "Nasser Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>
wrote:

>
>May be because it takes a little more time to draw diagrams?
>
>btw, I use Microsoft Visio software to make diagrams. It is really 
>easy to use and very powerfull and one can generate very professional 
>looking digrams with it. I recommend it. I tried many others, but 
>Visio is simply the best. (I have no relation with MS, and do not even 
>own MS stocks)
>

Visio maybe the best, but if you don't have the $$ or the operating
system to run it, I find dia the best of the open source versions.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Georg Bauhaus]

Rob Norris wrote:

> Visio maybe the best, but if you don't have the $$ or the operating
> system to run it, I find dia the best of the open source versions.
> 
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

Or Sketch, or sodipodi, or ...

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Randy Brukardt]

<chrismiller677@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1126512087.368854.121520@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?
>
> Think about it - the whole Ada culture seems obsessed with text. Page
> after page after page of boring text.
>
> Perhaps it all stems from the text based Ada Language Reference manual?

Pictures are pretty much irrelevant to standards work. Diagrams might make
sense in a few cases, but they're hard to fit into the ISO requirements,
they can't be searched for content, and they are hard to support in the many
different formats that the standard appears in. Moreover, Ada itself is a
text language, so there isn't any critical need to use non-text in the
standard.

Why there aren't more diagrams and pictures in tutorial and advocacy
information is something you'll have to ask the authors of those sites and
papers. Probably, they simply couldn't find anything appropriate to use.
(The only pictures that RRS has ever used was the almost cliched pictures of
rockets and airplanes. After all, what the heck does a compiler look like??)

> Some examples :
> - www.ada-auth.org. Home page, no pictures, all text. In fact I
> couldn't find any pictures on the entire Web site. (Can anyone else?)

You clearly didn't try hard enough. There are *lots* of pictures on
ada-auth.org. But they don't have much to do with Ada (they're recording our
various meetings). There are a couple of articles with diagrams in the grab
bag section. And of course the folder and file icons in the VCS are
"pictures". But the site is *very* vanilla, as it is intended for people
actively working on creating and/or implementing the Ada standard. There
isn't any money, time, or need for anything fancy. Anyone coming there that
isn't creating or implementing the Ada standard is probably in the wrong
place. Use www.adaic.org, www.adapower.com, or www.adaworld.com instead.

> - The holy grail. Ada 95 ref manual  & Standard Libraries. 543 pages. I
> gave up looking, the closest I came was the hierarchy of language-
> defined classes in section 3.2 12.

Let me assure you that there is no graphics of any kind in the Ada reference
manual (any version). There are a few tables, but the tools that create
these documents are purely for processing text. In any case, this is a
*reference* document; any value of it to promoting Ada is purely accidental.

As several others have said, please suggest and help provide the pictures
and diagrams that you think would be valuable. Those of us that are already
familar with the trees often have a hard time figuring out what makes it
hard for others to see the forest...

                               Randy.

Re: Ada culture & pictures.

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> You clearly didn't try hard enough. There are *lots* of pictures on
> ada-auth.org. But they don't have much to do with Ada (they're recording our
> various meetings). There are a couple of articles with diagrams in the grab
> bag section. And of course the folder and file icons in the VCS are
> "pictures". But the site is *very* vanilla, as it is intended for people
> actively working on creating and/or implementing the Ada standard. There
> isn't any money, time, or need for anything fancy. Anyone coming there that
> isn't creating or implementing the Ada standard is probably in the wrong
> place. Use www.adaic.org, www.adapower.com, or www.adaworld.com instead.

Actually, I use ada-auth.org frequently to get to the on-line ARM at adaic.org. 
It's 2 clicks from ada-auth.org, and 3 from adaic.org (4 to get to the contents, 
which is where ada-auth.org takes you).

I know, I know, I should bookmark the ARM. One of these days I will.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"There's no messiah here. There's a mess all right, but no messiah."
Monty Python's Life of Brian
84