Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Brad Moore <brad.moore@shaw.ca>]

On 2014-07-06 11:18 AM, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> On Sunday, July 6, 2014 11:25:04 AM UTC-5, gautier...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> For example, would a first-order-logic library attract Prolog programmers?
>> You want to attract a few programmers of language #29 in the hope of improving the rank of language #36 ?
>
> As a matter of fact:  yes.  Ada will not get more popular by blind copying of C++.  Why?  Because C++ got more popular throughout the late-1980s and throughout the 1990s by copying many of Ada's wisdoms.  C++ & Ada are quite similar on C++'s bullet-point feature-list basis that is touted to woo potential C++ programmers to C++.  Left unstated by the C++ wooing is that C++'s & Ada's primary differentiators are:
> 1) that C++ has so many undefined behaviors; and
> 2) C++ discovered that templates are Turing complete and have a quite-syntactically-uncouth poor-man's functional-programming language by accident.
> And those are not anything that Ada wants at all.  Indeed, these are C++'s achilles heals to attack by Ada doing something well that encourages C++ to do a bad job mimicking via
> 3) more & more undefined behaviors exposing the C++ programmer to more & more of a house of cards; and
> 4) more & more complexity in C++'s functional-programming via templates.
>
> What will make Ada more popular is for people to get from Ada what they cannot get easily or at all from other languages.  The goal of the Ada community must always be to figure out what that new special sauce is to sell more McAda burgers, preferably a special sauce for Ada that is impossible or impractical in other languages, such as too easily stepping into C++ undefined-behavior cow-pies all over the C++ pasture or requiring an excessive amount of functional-programming via C++ templates.  By constantly adding more special sauces for numerous niche markets, and perhaps one big special sauce for a breakthrough in Ada's core competencies (a brand new/drastically-expanded analogue of what Ada1983 did in the late-1970s & early-1980s for compile-time checking of likely bugs), eventually a greater preponderance of programmers will ask C++:  "Where's the beef?  Why can't C++ have what Ada has?"  But the numerous special sauces for Ada's clams to fame must come first for C++ programme
rs to have any envy at all---just like the envy that C++ had for the feature-set-superior Ada1983 during C++'s rise during the late-1980s and the 1990s.
>
> Likewise for identifying Java's achilles heal(s) and Ada one-upping Java in those areas of Java's weakness:  Imagine a Qt 'cute' or WxWidgets designed from the ground up in Ada-think instead of C++isms to one-up Java-with-Swing, solving whatever problems are commonplace in Java-with-Swing (e.g., lack of native look-&-feel, lack of native multithreading, lack of machine-code instead of JVM bytecode, lack of Ada compile-time strictness & lifetime-proving).
>
> The path to Ada popularity:
> More special sauces for more niche markets that cause wounds in other languages' Achilles' heals to fester.
>

I think another path to Ada popularity would be to raise awareness of 
the differences.

There was a paper entitled "C++? A Critique of C++ and Programming 
Language Trends of the 1990s." by Ian Joyner written way back in 1996, 
available in numerous places on the web, including here:

http://archive.adaic.com/intro/ada-vs-c/cppcv3.pdf

The paper is written by someone who obviously has a strong knowledge of 
Eiffel and C++, but raised some good criticisms which I think mostly 
still would apply today.

When I read it years ago, I remember thinking that Ada didn't have the 
problems cited for C++, and the main area where Eiffel had an advantage 
was in the area of contracts. Now that we have Ada 2012, I think that 
area is pretty well covered.

I think it would be good if someone could write a similar paper today, 
with broader coverage of current programming languages, and in 
particular with better content for the Ada programming language.

Maybe the original author, Ian Joyner could be convinced to do a 4th 
Edition?

Brad