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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??
Date: Wed, 09 May 2018 16:33:11 -0700
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Date: 2018-05-09T16:33:11-07:00
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"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>> ... you end up designing a DSL to make such
>> templates.  That's very easy in Lisp but not so easy in Ada.
>
> Says you, who seems to have no idea of what the capabilities of Ada really 
> are or how to use it.

Maybe I'm wrong but I see Ada as an Algol/Pascal descended imperative
language partway between C and C++ in let's call it "automation level",
whose main attractions are 1) much higher safety from type and pointer
errors than C or C++ have, and 2) a really serious package and module
system to help encapsulate big system components.

I've enough C, C++, Pascal etc. in my life to have a sense (at least
based on the above) of what to expect from Ada.  Solid low-level code is
one of those things, ease of writing DSL's is not one ;-).  The GNAT
environment is a huge resource hog compared to a small Lisp system
(Janus might be smaller).  The CBSG program takes around 7 seconds to
compile and you're proposing running such a compilation on every update,
instead of a Lisp read or database operation that would take
milliseconds on a system using one of those programs.

Again in the CBSG case, that 7 second compilation is probably ok, nobody
wants to update it that frequently or deploy it across 1000s of
servers.  But the approach doesn't generalize.

> We made the serious mistake of making allowances in the OOP design for
> such people, and that led to several of the worst features of Ada.

Well, that was 1995 and the OOP drugs were in the water everywhere then ;-).
Things are saner now, I think.