Re: Re-Marketing Ada (was "With and use")

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2598 bytes --]



"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:3FBA1118.4060105@noplace.com...
> While I agree wholeheartedly with your belief in what a University ought
> to be about, there is often a big difference between what ought to be
> and what is. Too many university professors these days would happily
> quote Pontius Pilot: "Truth? What is Truth?".
>
> That said, I don't think that your arguments - while very well founded -
> are likely to gain traction on their own. There is a need to change the
> perception that Ada is a dying language before profs (or anyone else,
> for that matter) are going to regain any interest in using it. They are
> likely to look at your arguments and respond that these same qualities
> are available to a greater or lesser degree in other languages that are
> *new* and *going somewhere*. Ada has to offer them something fresh and
> new or they won't want to tie their careers or those of their students
> to a technology that is perceived as being on the way out.
>
> MDC
>

I think on of the main problems also is that Ada is not perceived as a
General Purpose language.  People still think it's a millitary language (i'm
not talking Ada savy, but the common programmer that hasn't been thought Ada
and suddenly learnes about it.   It's a realtime embedded development
language and they don't quite see it as a language to develop the next
Office suite in.  They somehow think it's out of their league or something.

They think it's a language for Engineers because of all the engineering
principles that relate to Ada. Since they took courses in programming, not
engineering (at least as far as C++, Delphi, VB programmers today) I don't
think it's the language they don't want to use, I think it's the software
engineering concepts they don't want to learn.  Either that or they think
they'll need to learn 2 things before they can "proficiently" use Ada.
Although not far from the truth (based on my own learning experience), they
don't see that what they'll learn when learning Ada can also apply to the
other languages they might use.

OF course, before the GPS (Gnat programming system) thre also was nothing
close to an integrated IDE for Ada either.  Maybe the GPS will change (at
least part of) the perception newcomers have of Ada.  Maybe more integration
tools should exist too.   Seems today, the popular thing is wizards in
applcations that accomplish basic setup of applications for example.  visual
tools like that that eases the development cycle a bit.


-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com