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=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c406e0c4a6eb74ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:58:42 +0200 Message-ID: <1g5v98l6p9j6.omv7rea0j13k.dlg@40tude.net> References: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de D6tB4QbbdCqfPzsLUR6e8Ql63dK9zd7677AAU7Py/W4DKx52Y= User-Agent: 40tude_Dialog/2.0.12.1 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2803 Date: 2004-08-18T10:58:42+02:00 List-Id: On 17 Aug 2004 16:54:18 -0700, Kevin Cline wrote: > I don't your guru got it quite right. Ada failed because most > programmers who tried it found Ada programming to be relative less > productive than programming in other available languages. I do not think so. When I started to work with Ada I found it more productive than FORTRAN, PL/1 or C (the most popular languages that time, around me. Well there were also unpopular Algol 60, awful COBOL, dreadful Forth, half-baked Pascal and nice, but unavailable Modula) I believe that Ada 83 came too early and looked too far ahead, so it failed to solve many of the problems it tried to. These problems (with ADT, concurrency, checkability) are not solved in either language until now. > Ada never > attracted a large enough base of motivated users to develop the > libraries and IDEs that would make it easy to use. That time there were no user movements we observe now. That Borland chose Pascal and not Ada was rather a coincident (probably they wanted not to be bound by any standard, making a product for what was seen as a "play station".) I also suspect that GNU people chose C just because they didn't trust in their ability to create a quality compiler in an observable period of time and get it working on small machines. > In a nutshell, Ada is not popular because most people who have tried > it didn't like it. I think that they rather didn't try it at all. I believe you overestimate people's desire to try languages. My guess is that 50% of people just stay with the first language they finished the first real project. 40% remain by the second language. The criteria of selecting first two languages are not in Ada's favor: 1. What I was taught 2. What is used around me 3. Current hype -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de