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

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

"Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net> writes:
> I would jettison as much of Ada1983 (lacking OO!) as possible,
> focusing instead on Ada1995 (with OO!) if you absolutely must narrow
> to one edition.

In the functional-programming world we tend to think of OO as a failed
1990s experiment that still has a zombie following in the "enterprise"
sector.  Even C++ has moved mostly from OO to template generics.

> rather a 1000-page encyclopedia of Ada-by-recipes... :
> 1) here are smart pointers in C++2017, but here is better memory
> management in Ada2012;
> 2) here is spooky mistake-making type inference in other languages...

This would be great to see.  Rosettacode.org might be a good place to
put some examples.  There's lots of Ada code there already that mostly
looks ok, but I don't remember any that really stand out.

> especially to lambasting Python/Ruby/Lua/Haskell/ML/F#/C#/Java/Kotlin
> on performance via actual empirical timing measurements on
> analogously-designed implementations in those languages versus Ada.

That will persuade almost nobody using those languages, since they are
primarily writing internet stuff.  We just don't care how slow the
languages are.  Any query you make over the internet will require at
least a 100 msec communication roundtrip, plus whatever the computation
time is.  If Ada can do the computation in 20 microseconds while Python
takes a whole millisecond, the user will never notice that 50x slowdown.
And the developer is happy to take the slowdown in order to ship their
product a week earlier.

Obviously there are exceptions and bottlenecks but those are correctly
handled as special cases.  The old 90-10 rule is now more like 95-5 or
even 99-1.  See:

https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/slides-djb-20150416-a4.pdf

> that youth will find attractive, because it is like a bound book form
> of StackOverflow.

Even an oldie like me doesn't look at bound books that much any more.  I
doubt many young'uns even know what they are.  If it's not online it
doesn't exist.