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,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: chris@unixfu.net (Chris Humphries) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: ADA Popularity Discussion Request Date: 11 Aug 2004 06:56:17 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.197.191.126 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1092232589 27656 127.0.0.1 (11 Aug 2004 13:56:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 13:56:29 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2670 Date: 2004-08-11T06:56:17-07:00 List-Id: Hello, Would like to open up the newsgroup for discussion of why ADA is not as popular as (of now me learning it) to it is not as popular as other languages (Perl, Java, C++, C#, C). I can understand why C is popular, UNIX and all the tools for it and most of everything that runs the internet services (smtp, http [apache mostly according to netcraft.com], bind). Perl (well I use it at work, for legacy reasons of taking over code) I can understand due to it just being so easy to get something done fast in (and I must say that the regex abilities are definitely something that you can get used to quickly, heh. CPAN is also a nice feature, tons of modules/libraries to use for most everything one command line away. Java and C++ got huge during the OOP boom of the 90's, and now almost every Computer Science student in college has taken at least one of those languages. Java does have some nice OO abilities and there are a ton of libraries for it. C++ has some OO-ish abilities, yet can be compiled and also has a ton of libraries. Yet as I grew in my programming experience and abilities, I learned that most of my time was spent updating and fixing code. C/C++ took a lot of time to develop in, and I didn't like having to worry about memory management and use my gdb-fu to figure out why something did not work. Perl is somewhat better, though it is mostly just if syntax doesn't match up right. If it is quick and dirty, Perl excels. Granted, I do have a written from bottom up programs we now use in the company here as a core part of daily life and it is in nothing by Perl. Java is kinda nice, but honestly the dependency of the VM is nice in concept, but a pain in real life. You need to make sure that your program either is portable to several versions of virtual machines or you have to bundle your own (for client apps). Java is just too slow (I can not afford the hardware or even justify it's use of hardware money to make it's speed comparable with other "free" alternatives) for cgi based applications, though the whole application server thing with db connection pooling is cool. Python is nice too, and I suppose no real reason to not use it. I have coded python since 1.5 and early Zope releases. I just would like to not code in it anymore, though reason are because I am sick of it. So, why is ADA not as popular as the above languages to the world (well especially opensource developers) outside of dod and defense contractors and banks? It seems like an extremely powerful and awesome language, and it is just so easy to look at the code and tell what is going on and what is what. It can be OO and can run tasks concurrently. It's runtime and compile checking is awesome. GNAT is free and available to all to use. So what is stopping ADA from being a language everyone knows? Is it just viewed as old and arcane like COBOL and Fortran (no offense to those that know these languages better than me)? Is it just lacking some killer apps? Is it because most ADA is closed source, so there are just not libraries out there (like a SSH library)? Thanks, Chris