Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Thursday, April 19, 2018 at 9:28:24 AM UTC-5, Shark8 wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 10:01:31 PM UTC-6, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> > 
> > But any Ada compilers that “support” Microsoft OSes out of the box are stuck in the Win32 era not much different than as shown in that cruel Ada spec above.
> 
> What's truly sad is that many APIs would do a *lot* better as Ada than as C or C++, simply because of the addition of aspects and pre/post-conditions. (With the addition of static/disjoint subtypes [see below] following close behind.)

This is true.  And it is the kind of value-add that only a human being can perform, given current technology.  Ada-WinRT is a major step in the right direction—and even more so if the code generator were finished & publicly available.  But to truly show off Ada would require manually adding portions of the specification that can only be expressed in Ada (or via formal methods).

> > What is especially sad is that Microsoft has gone to great lengths over the past 1.5 decades to make this rich object library language agnostic, designed for language projections to feel native in each language—
> 
> This is true, but I'm not sure how to address the problem. A lot of it has to do with the limited amount of resources we have to develop Ada, due to our small size, which remains small in part due to the above problem.
> 
> Perhaps 95% of "what's holding us back" is the combination of the above [usually expressed as "lack of libraries"] and the compiler/tooling situation.

Well, yes there is all that from a how-did-we-get-here retrospective perspective.  But perhaps more beneficial is to ask:  why is Rust garnering so much revolutionary energy over there (and Ada far far less so)?  Rust seems to have the angry young turks thing going.  There is that kind of energy.  But from this day forward, Ada needs a very public fire in its belly to attract perhaps a different kind of fervent energy (e.g., more formal methods—more than just SPARKy subsets of Ada; more code-generation-of-Ada harvesting at least interfaces to other languages' vast OO frameworks, such as UWP on Windows 10, Android SDK, CocoaTouch on iOS, Cocoa on MacOS; indeed! harvesting whole codebases of other languages in the fashion of RemObjects' ElementCompiler-confederation's shared-AST among C#, Swift, Java, and ObjectPascal with ObjectPascal being an über-Alles/Eye-of-Sauron central-nexus among the confederation of the other languages into a single compiler).  Ada (plus SPARK and Coq) would be a stronger foundation for being an über-Alles/Eye-of-Sauron language importing, analyzing, and taming isomorphic transliterations of other languages than ObjectPascal is in ElementsCompiler.  Some sort of fire in our belly like that!

Ada needs a new purpose to live a vibrant bigger life, far beyond what Ichbiah and the DoD envisioned in the 1970s.