Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

stephane richard wrote:

> People need to know that Ada exists or they'll never enter any Ada related 
> search words hence never get Ada related results on search engines.

Oh I think most programmers know it exists. The problem is that they 
seem to think its name is "Oh no, not Ada!", and that's all they know 
about it.

> Maybe we need to push more the home user, the fella that wants to 
> work in his basement to create the next revolutionary software, the common 
> user?

That'd be me. Well, I don't think what I've done so far is exactly 
revolutionary, but I have dreams. :-)

I don't need to see ads for something in every magazine to get 
interested. Excessive advertising is more likely to drive me away. When 
I read about computer languages, protocols, programs or operating 
systems I often want to try them out. In most cases I never get around 
to it; there are just too many things to try. What made me actually try 
Ada was a section about exception handling in a book. I had been coding 
in Turbo Pascal and been annoyed at all the error handling I had to do 
all over the code. I instantly knew I wanted exceptions. And the code 
example in that section was in Ada. So, maybe we should sprinkle the Web 
with short examples of how to do things in Ada that other languages 
can't do?

Free software enthusiasts take pride in making more stable and secure 
software than the closed source vendors, and at least some of them are 
frustrated over the never-ceasing stream of security holes in everything 
from kernels to media players. They usually think better testing and 
more code review is the answer. I do my best to spread the idea that 
buffer overflows are caused by a bad choice of language.

-- 
Björn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
                    r o.b n.p son eri nu