From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 2002:a24:2f41:: with SMTP id j62-v6mr3648238itj.19.1524151503765; Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:25:03 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:a9d:4819:: with SMTP id c25-v6mr252043otf.9.1524151503649; Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:25:03 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!news.roellig-ltd.de!open-news-network.org!peer02.am4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!peer02.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!f63-v6no435244itc.0!news-out.google.com!u64-v6ni773itb.0!nntp.google.com!f63-v6no435243itc.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:25:03 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=47.185.233.194; posting-account=zwxLlwoAAAChLBU7oraRzNDnqQYkYbpo NNTP-Posting-Host: 47.185.233.194 References: <1c73f159-eae4-4ae7-a348-03964b007197@googlegroups.com> <06a8980d-21bb-4067-b22d-7d1f89342948@googlegroups.com> <19c7a205-0a82-477b-9254-01af786f467e@googlegroups.com> <06adad02-803a-4dc7-b5d8-f9a5d8faa3ab@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <07018233-f5bb-4c20-a94f-13b9cea10828@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm?? From: "Dan'l Miller" Injection-Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2018 15:25:03 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Received-Bytes: 4703 X-Received-Body-CRC: 1040690732 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:51635 Date: 2018-04-19T08:25:03-07:00 List-Id: 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: > >=20 > > But any Ada compilers that =E2=80=9Csupport=E2=80=9D Microsoft OSes out= of the box are stuck in the Win32 era not much different than as shown in = that cruel Ada spec above. >=20 > 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-condition= s. (With the addition of static/disjoint subtypes [see below] following clo= se 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=E2=80=94and even more so if the code generator were finished & pu= blicly available. But to truly show off Ada would require manually adding = portions of the specification that can only be expressed in Ada (or via for= mal 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, d= esigned for language projections to feel native in each language=E2=80=94 >=20 > This is true, but I'm not sure how to address the problem. A lot of it ha= s 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. >=20 > Perhaps 95% of "what's holding us back" is the combination of the above [= usually expressed as "lack of libraries"] and the compiler/tooling situatio= n. Well, yes there is all that from a how-did-we-get-here retrospective perspe= ctive. But perhaps more beneficial is to ask: why is Rust garnering so mu= ch revolutionary energy over there (and Ada far far less so)? Rust seems t= o have the angry young turks thing going. There is that kind of energy. B= ut from this day forward, Ada needs a very public fire in its belly to attr= act perhaps a different kind of fervent energy (e.g., more formal methods= =E2=80=94more 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; inde= ed! harvesting whole codebases of other languages in the fashion of RemObje= cts' ElementCompiler-confederation's shared-AST among C#, Swift, Java, and = ObjectPascal with ObjectPascal being an =C3=BCber-Alles/Eye-of-Sauron centr= al-nexus among the confederation of the other languages into a single compi= ler). Ada (plus SPARK and Coq) would be a stronger foundation for being an= =C3=BCber-Alles/Eye-of-Sauron language importing, analyzing, and taming is= omorphic transliterations of other languages than ObjectPascal is in Elemen= tsCompiler. Some sort of fire in our belly like that! Ada needs a new purpose to live a vibrant bigger life, far beyond what Ichb= iah and the DoD envisioned in the 1970s.