Re: Ada

[tsikes@netcom.com (Terry Sikes)]

In article <83u8l0$5i5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
Robert Dewar  <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
>In article <83tohh$q2s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>  reason67@my-deja.com wrote:
>> In article <38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com>,
>>   Brijesh <brijesh.malkan@gecm.com> wrote:
>>> I am fairly new to Ada programming and have a rather trivial
>>> question I was hoping the group could help answer.
>>>
>>> I understand Ada is a very powerful language but is not
>>> used much outside the defence industry, I was woderign if
>>> this is a correct assumption and if so why is this the
>>> case - and if not where else is it used.
>>
>> In the USA around 1% of comercial software was written in Ada.
>> So, your assumption is correct.
>
>I wonder where that figure of 1% comes from. If true, it means
>that Ada is widely used, since this is 1% of an absolutely HUGE
>market (1% is much higher than you think, once you have
>subtracted out the really popular languages like COBOL and
>Visual Basic, the latter accounting for the lion's share of
>all software development).

I'm curious as to the source of your assertion regarding Visual Basic.
For one look at "per language" programmer demand, see
www.lmarkets.com, which seems to show both C++ and Java considerably
ahead of VB (of course this is programmer demand, not programmer body
count).  Perhaps someone should lobby the site maintainer to include
Ada on the chart, even if it is a low scorer today - perhaps a
positive trend will start at some point.

>In fact I suspect the figure is below 1%, but again, we are
>talking percentages of a huge market, so even a sliver of this
>can be highly significant. After all what percentage of the
>over all automobile market does Ferrari have or Rolls Royce,
>yet we still consider these technologies significant :-)
>
>Certainly we all know lots of examples of successful commercial
>use of Ada.

True.

>There seems to be a general tendency to write off technologies
>that do not dominate the market. I can't tell you how many
>people I meet who think OS/2 is dead, when in fact it is being
>very successful in many contexts (and has exceeded sales
>expectations every quarter for the last 5 or 6 quarters). Sure
>it does not have the market share of Windows, but this again is
>a huge market, and OS/2 has a significant share.

Yes, I think this is a quite unfortunate effect of the amount of
information the average programmer intellect can absorb over time.
Personally, I decided to pursue other languages years ago when Ada
compilers were all really expensive, and its use appeared to be
declining even in the DoD.  Now, with free compilers available, an OO
programming model available (Ada95), and an upcoming RT control
application in my future, Ada is looking very interesting all of a
sudden.  ;-)

>A similar situation exists with Ada. Of course it is not
>numerically as successful as C++ for example, but that really
>does not mean much. If you need the most reliable and best
>technology around, you do not take a poll to see what is the
>most commonly used technology!

Again true, but I can't help but think that wider adoption would be a
very good thing for the language.  Many projects may have gone with
other technologies simply based on the available Ada talent pool.

I've been involved with Java for a while, and it appears to me that
with suitable library support Ada could be a great alternative for (at
least) server side programming.  (IIRC there is an Ada=>JVM solution,
but I don't know much about it.)

There's a lot of discussion on the Java advocacy newsgroup about the
desirability (or lack thereof;) of generics, operator overloading and
so on.  From what I can tell, Ada provides good implementations of
these things as opposed to C++.  Also, the scientific community has
shown significant interest in a modified Java for numerical
programming (www.javagrande.org), that also seems potentially a
fertile ground for Ada advocacy.  Heck, Ada is even an ISO standard...
;-)

Looking at Ada95, it seems to me to be close to a "sweet spot" in
terms of features, efficiency, language safety, and
performance...perhaps its time for an Ada renaissance!

Terry
--
tsikes@netcom.com