Re: What is wrong with Ada?

["Chip and Allie Orange" <acorange@comcast.net>]

"martinbishop" <jedibebop@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1176150704.130880.248080@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> I've never been scared of "non mainstream" languages, but I was
> wondering, what is wrong with Ada?  Why don't more people use it?
> What
> do most people think of it?  To me, it seems like a nice, concise, and
> safe language, but I haven't used it yet.
>

Hi Martin,

I'm just now starting to learn Ada, but I've been "looking at it" for quite 
a while.  I'd say the answer to your question is that no one uses it much, 
because, no one uses it much.

My boss won't allow anything at work that isn't already being used by 
everyone else.  A lot of software choices are made for more or less those 
reasons.  As a corollary to this, it's impossible for us to hire anyone with 
Ada programming experience, as an entry level programmer, and hiring someone 
without experience in your software development systems of choice "just 
isn't done".  Since what we have access to are endless visual studio 
programmers, that was used as an argument for what we should be using to 
develop with.

The other reason I see is that it's not easily compatible with ActiveX, COM, 
.net, and all the other interfacing standards that development add-ons are 
sold for (in the Windows world).  It's advantages of taking less effort, in 
the long term, to maintain a given project, are offset by having to "roll 
your own" everything in the beginning.


Just a newbie's outside view, but maybe you'll want to do what I'm doing: 
jump in and begin preaching to the unconverted!

    Chip