Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

["Richard Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message
news:cgppvn$t4m$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
>
> See? :-)  So if this were the only factor for choosing a language,
> Ada's popularity will be a function of the popularity of the military.
>
Popularity is rarely a good reason for choosing
any tool, including a programming language.  We
who are software developers must understand
how to use more than one tool (language, method,
process, etc).  Certainly some software practitioners
may restrict themselves to one toolset, but this
will have the long-term effect of also restricting
their own career progress.

We choose a tool, in any domain, according to its
being appropriate for the problem we are trying to
solve.

To draw a somewhat rough analogy, one that I have
used before in public lectures and in my publications,
when I need a torque wrench (Ada) that is the tool
I should choose.  When I can get by with an adjustable,
fits anything wrench, I might find C satisfactory for
the job.

Smalltalk is an excellent tool for object-oriented
programming, and a good choice when the
deeper concern is not software safety.   Functional
languages free the developer from concerns about
the underlying representation issues, and allow one
to work at a level of abstraction not easily available
in imperative languages.    I find it difficult to use
functional languages for multiple programmer
projects that are what we might call, large-scale.

A poet friend of mine once explained that he writes
some of his poems in more than one form before he
is satisfied with the outcome.  For example, he might
have an idea for a poem which he first writes as free
verse.   Then he might try to write the same poem as
a sonnet.  Later he might try to express the idea in
several haiku.   At some point he might toy with it as
a kind of jingle.   He plays with the language, the meter,
the structure, and the style before he decides on what
the final poem should look like.

A well-known software practitioner once explained that
he first likes to write his software in Smalltalk, then produce
the final code in Ada.  This is somewhat like an artist who
works in oil, but first sketches some ideas on the canvas
with a pencil.

Each of us works toward the completion of a software
product in a different way.   Some are more comfortable
with C++.  I'm not one of them.  Others are more comfortable
with Smalltalk, Lisp, OCAML, etc.   Over the years, I
have become more comfortable with Ada.  I find myself
able to express my ideas in the language, most of the
time.

There is no perfect programming language. Sometimes I
might want to mix Ada and some other language (e.g.,
SQL or C) to achieve a level of expressiveness not
directly available in Ada.   That does not make Ada
bad.  Rather, the ability to mix other languages into
my Ada code is one of the things I like about the language.

So, we choose a language, not because it is popular,
but because it has the expressive power for the
problem space we require.   In large-scale software,
where lots of people will be involved in the development,
and a high level of reuse is required, the structural and
semantic model of Ada seems to be better than most.
When certain features of some other language need to be
incorporated into that large-scale design, it is no sin
to admit such and take advantage of the expressive
power of both Ada and the imported language to
develop the appropriate solution.

Richard Riehle