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

[patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org]

Hi Everyone

I was having trouble reading this thread so I thought I would print it, bad idea! It's already 46 pages.

I want to weigh in on this.

For those who don't know me. I studied Ada everyday in 2012. I bought or printed 53lbs of Ada books. I failed. After 1 year, I just couldn't write the software I wanted to write in Ada and I basically moved on.

While I hope to change this in late 2018 early 2019, I am not a professional program, I make my living repairing and/or reselling scientific instruments, please keep this in mind.

I am very grateful for all the help I received in 2012 and I still want to use Ada.

I have some things to say and this is only meant as CONSTRUCTIVE criticism.

Instead of talking about how to get Ada over the Chasm, could we stop for a moment and talk about who has already made it over the chasm and is eating Ada's lunch. I believe this to be largely C++ with a bit of Java perhaps.

C++ is huge and it is complicated, much like Ada but IMHO, there is no comparison between the two. Indeed Barnes, said "ease yourself into the language" and this can be done. Can it with Ada? Aside from toy programs that don't do anything, how does one start with simple useful Ada code. To me, this is Free Pascal, not Ada at all.

People can start with processing and have fun with Arduinos, then move to C and then move to C++. In fact there are multiple roads to C++ fluency and they are fun. The sheer number of programmers really means something because this means a larger community and more libraries which in turn brings even more programmers.

Many/most languages have their bigots but Ada has so many. In this list and in most of the Ada books I have read there is an air of snobbery about Ada and how it is so much better than language XYZ etc.

I don't like PHP and no one in their right mind would say it was a better language technically but is it better in other ways?

I heard an interview with Rasmus Lerdorf, he thinks PHP is so great because it is accessible. He was very happy to hear about a dentist that wrote a dental clinic management program in PHP.

Python is taught to elementary kids yet it is also good enough for Google and NASA. Are these organizations stupid for using it? Could be we be rubbing people the wrong way with our stance?(I have joined the snob band wagon at times myself)

Is Ada not catching on because of a GPL licensing issue? Really? I don't even know what is missing from the FSF version vs the Adacore GPL version, it's certainly not an issue for me, my main problem has been the limited libraries and the difficulty in interfacing with C to create the libraries that do not exist with Ada.

In fact is there not fewer and fewer Ada libraries each year? Sure there are new ones but it seems to me that the old ones are becoming more and more stale.

For Ada to succeed I believe it has to SCALE DOWN and be more friendly and accepting and we have to interface more easily with C.

Again I am grateful for the help her but is this not a very judgmental place? If someone doesn't like the formatting of your code, your going to hear about it. Regular posters seem to be consistently engaged in posturing, trying to prove that they are better Ada programmers than the other regular posters.

Other lists suffer from this but perhaps not to the same extent. Would you want to send your high school age child to ask a question here? They would be fine if they announced they are a newbie or young but failing this, they will get flamed. It seems that everyone is expected to be a professional programmer here. I remember many years ago posting to the "python newbie" list. I felt very comfortable as I was expected to have dumb questions.

Ada is huge and then there is the standard library to learn and potentially another build system with GPR.

I am not using Ada right now but I just posted to the list about using shared objects because I am slowly trying to figure out how to write up a document(or possibly a book as I have a publishers account) that will introduce simple ways to mix Ada with C and to introduce a subset of the language to new programmers. We don't have a large enough community to support the libraries that probably a lot of programmers need. IMHO it's critical to be able to write your own bindings.

And there there is the hugeness of the language. How could any dentist or young person be expected to cover it all? I think it's important to learn a subset. I am personally trying to only use Ada83 and this is the subset I would like to eventually include in a book or PDF.

Please stop to consider how programming languages are acquired, it's the people programming in their pajamas that will be tomorrow's C++ programmer or they might be in a management position and deciding what language will be used.

Please also consider how we appear to others. VCRs are gone now but it my understanding that BETA was much better than VHS but it died. Better doesn't mean it lives on, there are other forces.

-Patrick