Re: Ada

["Jon Jensen" <jonsjensen@email.msn.com>]

As someone who started doing Ada programming in 1987 I think the answer to
your question is simple:

The PC and Windows

In the 80's when Ada was first introduced, it was overshadowed by the
introduction of the PC and the drastic change the PC brought into industry.
This was compounded by the lack of inexpensive, high quality Ada compilers,
debuggers and tools on the PC.  As developers migrated from mainframe and
minicomputer development to PC development they didn't see Ada as a viable
alternative to the Pascal and C compilers that were available.

A similar change happened in the early 90's when developers migrated from
MS-DOS programming to Windows programming on the PC.  Again Ada was late to
the game in coming up with competitive compilers for Windows.  Again Ada was
ignored by most Windows developers.

Could it have been different?  I don't think so.  Any time any language is
mandated by law as opposed to being adopted as a defacto industry standard,
it is going to have an uphill struggle.

There seems to be a perception in this news group and in the Ada industry
that programming in Ada somehow makes your programs error proof.  Ada
certainly has features that make it less likely to program certain kind of
errors but you can certainly write bad code in Ada just as in any other
language.  Java purists would say that because Ada (and other languages)
allow pointers, programs developed with those languages are error prone.

There are still a lot of opportunities for Ada development out there.  I am
sure there is a lot of embedded systems work that is being done with it and
some commercial applications.  In these narrow areas you can certainly make
a living programming in Ada.  Ada development (done right) can also teach
you some wonderful things about resuability and modularity.  It isn't a
silver bullet.


Brijesh <brijesh.malkan@gecm.com> wrote in message
news:38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com...
> I am fairly new to Ada programming and have a rather trivial question I
> was hoping the group could help answer.
>
> I understand Ada is a very powerful language but is not used much
> outside the defence industry, I was woderign if this is a correct
> assumption and if so why is this the case - and if not where else is it
> used.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brij
>