Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

W dniu środa, 9 lipca 2014 17:01:53 UTC+2 użytkownik Brad Moore napisał:

> I think if the goal is to produce a 
> document that promotes the use of Ada, then I think maybe a better 
> approach would be to focus on Ada specifically, and highlight the things 
> that Ada got right, rather than try to point out problems in other 
> languages.

Exactly. Considering the expected target, the Ada language is most likely to be adopted by C and C++ programmers and the problem with many pro-Ada documents is that they try to focus on criticising C++. It's not a good way to make friends and hostility is not going to work here.

I have tried to promote Ada by doing something different: get the list of things that are considered to be features (!) in C++ and show that Ada does them even better. Like, say, control over memory allocation schemes. Every reasonably competent C++ programmer knows that having the possibility to write a custom memory allocator by means of overloaded new operators is an important language feature that can improve performance or provide other benefits; show them that Ada is even more flexible with this (by associating allocation scheme with pointer type instead of the target object type) and you get people at least intrigued. There are many more aspects where you can spin the discussion towards "Ada is even better where C++ is good" mindset.

I did not manage to introduce Ada for production projects this way (but we did some side-way projects thanks to this), but the level of interest was certainly much higher than with the "if you put a stray semicolon here it will be a disaster" method that unfortunately many Ada advocates still believe in.

Don't try to promote Ada by criticising other languages. It just doesn't work.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com