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

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

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> We offer embedded kits, but those are much higher priced because

If they are in the $1K-$2K range, that's competitive with the C and
Forth products that I mentioned.  If they're much above that, people
will be thinking about GNAT Pro.

> moved to other development systems when the 186 hardware was retired.
> Since then, I don't think anyone has even asked about it. (And of
> course any such system has to run on a desktop.)

If you've got a reasonable ARM target that supports some common dev
boards, you're doing good, and should advertise that on your site.

> These days, I'd expect Ada's biggest contribution (outside of
> embedded, an area that is well-covered by others) to be on (possibly
> distributed) server-side programs in client-server environments.

I just don't see this.  I hear about Gnoga but it seems like a case of
using Ada for the sake of using Ada.  If someone wants an old-fashioned,
statically typed imperative language for server side apps, they're far
more likely to use Java.  It might be convincing ("crossing the chasm")
to replace some of the traditional C infrastructure (nginx might be a
good place to start) with Ada, but only if you can come close to the old
stuff's performance.  Or preferably, beat the old stuff's performance
outright.

I couldn't imagine writing a substantial server app entirely in Ada.  I
could see writing some critical subsystems in Ada and my interest in Ada
is partly motivated by that idea.  Embedded seems a lot more promising.

>> Well, the discussion was about using SPARK to prove much more
>> complicated assertions.
> Again, why?

You'd have to ask the folks who started the thread ;).  But
https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html
is a nice overview of why approaches like SPARK are interesting.

> It's hard as heck to get people to change everything about their
> programming experience at once. Starting programmers out writing
> better-C-in-Ada-syntax and gradually letting them find about the other
> benefits that they can have is the way to hook them for life.

I think convincing C programmers to switch to Ada won't help "cross the
chasm" even if 100% successful.  C was a 1980's thing and there aren't
that many programmers using it any more.  Lots of terrifically good
programmers these days have never written a line of C in their lives.
The starting point is very often either Javascript on the web side, or
something like Python on the computational side.  Then if they want
types, there is Java, Scala, Ocaml, Haskell, etc.  IMHO Ada's advantages
over those languages, for applications that need it, are more in the
area of runtime determinism (e.g. manual memory management) than types.
And I think that's important only in a fairly small class of
expectations.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see a breakout.

> But GUI programs are almost untestable in any repeatable way.

Eh?  Of course they're not.  You produce a GUI event stream similar to
what an actual user would produce, and check that the program does the
right thing.  There are many tools for this.

> That works in all of those cases because Ada detects a lot of problems
> at compile-time or runtime, so very little could happen that would
> actually be dangerous.

I guess it depends what you are trying to do.