Re: The future of Ada is at risk

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Agyaras" == Agyaras  <agyaras@kerekerdoe.hu> writes:

    Agyaras> 1) Perception. Ada is still perceived as "the Pentagon language", and is 
    Agyaras> associated in many people's minds with "evil". This perception is very 
    Agyaras> difficult to change.

I don't see this myself (with perhaps one person who liked to attack
Ada for the sack of attacking Ada without understanding it); people I
talk to consider Ada obsolete, not evil.

    Agyaras> 4) Ada limitations. Certain aspects of Ada are painfully clumsy. The 
    Agyaras> three string libs, unnecessary multitude of I/O libs, primitive 
    Agyaras> exception handling, constructors are not part of the language, 
    Agyaras> finalization is an afterthought,....

A bigger issue (and a strength as well as a weakness) is that you have
to write code to Ada's strict standards. Programmers feel that this is
tedious, and that they loose "control". They just want to do "X"
without having Ada's rules get in the way.

Also, Ada is a compiled language. Many people feel this is a major
limitation these days, and argue that the ability to make fast changes
is absolutely vital to their project.

Not that I agree with these points of views, but they you can't just
discount them as stupid or ignorant either. People do consider them as
big issues.

    Agyaras> 5) Lack of libraries and frameworks. This is due to the unpopularity of 
    Agyaras> the language. Ada needs at least a relational DB binding *that works* 
    Agyaras> with the current open-source RDBMS-es (as opposed to Gnade), she needs a 
    Agyaras> good scientific library, she needs simple but powerful string handling, 
    Agyaras> just to name a few. The catch-22 is that nobody will develop these until 
    Agyaras> there's strong demand for Ada-based s/w, and there won't be strong 
    Agyaras> demand until the libs are available.

I take it that gnade has problems??

An issue here is that we don't really want 500 different competing DB
bindings. Ideally we want one DB binding that is considered the
standard set for Ada. It is easy to write a DB binding to make an
individual happy, but to write one that makes the majority of the Ada
community happy - that might be harder. Thick or thin? GPL or BSD?
Database independent layer? etc

Another issue, in order to attract people from other languages, we
really need their input in creating these standards. Otherwise they
will complain that our libraries are still insufficient in ways we
never considered and continue with what they are use to.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>