Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[fmdf@tiscali.it (fabio de francesco)]

chris@unixfu.net (Chris Humphries) wrote in message news:<49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com>...
> Hello,
> 
>    Would like to open up the newsgroup for discussion of why
>  ADA is not as popular as (of now me learning it) to it is 
>  not as popular as other languages (Perl, Java, C++, C#, C).
> 
>    I can understand why C is popular, UNIX and all the tools
>  for it and most of everything that runs the internet services
>  (smtp, http [apache mostly according to netcraft.com], bind).
>  Perl (well I use it at work, for legacy reasons of taking over
>  code) I can understand due to it just being so easy to get
>  something done fast in (and I must say that the regex abilities
>  are definitely something that you can get used to quickly, heh.
>  CPAN is also a nice feature, tons of modules/libraries to use
>  for most everything one command line away.
> 
>    Java and C++ got huge during the OOP boom of the 90's, and now
>  almost every Computer Science student in college has taken at
>  least one of those languages.
> 
>    Java does have some nice OO abilities and there are a ton of
>  libraries for it. C++ has some OO-ish abilities, yet can be 
>  compiled and also has a ton of libraries.
> 
>    Yet as I grew in my programming experience and abilities, I
>  learned that most of my time was spent updating and fixing code.
> 
>    C/C++ took a lot of time to develop in, and I didn't like 
>  having to worry about memory management and use my gdb-fu to
>  figure out why something did not work.

I also must thank Ada for not to make me spend my time playing with
the debugger.

>    Perl is somewhat better, though it is mostly just if syntax
>  doesn't match up right. If it is quick and dirty, Perl excels.
>  Granted, I do have a written from bottom up programs we now use
>  in the company here as a core part of daily life and it is in
>  nothing by Perl.

I can't imagine anything less readable than Perl. I see it like the
exact opposite of Ada for that.
    
>    Java is kinda nice, but honestly the dependency of the VM is
>  nice in concept, but a pain in real life. You need to make sure
>  that your program either is portable to several versions of
>  virtual machines or you have to bundle your own (for client apps).
>  Java is just too slow (I can not afford the hardware or even justify
>  it's use of hardware money to make it's speed comparable with other
>  "free" alternatives) for cgi based applications, though the whole
>  application server thing with db connection pooling is cool.
> 
>    Python is nice too, and I suppose no real reason to not use it.
>  I have coded python since 1.5 and early Zope releases. I just would
>  like to not code in it anymore, though reason are because I am 
>  sick of it.
> 
>    So, why is ADA not as popular as the above languages to the
>  world (well especially opensource developers) outside of dod and
>  defense contractors and banks? It seems like an extremely powerful
>  and awesome language, and it is just so easy to look at the code
>  and tell what is going on and what is what. It can be OO and can
>  run tasks concurrently. It's runtime and compile checking is awesome.
>  GNAT is free and available to all to use.

Since a couple of months I have been learning Ada95 and I like it much
more than C/C++, even if I can say I am a good programmer with the
latter ones.
I think that the lack of Ada programmers produces little amount of
code to expand and to maintain and this produces little interest in
becoming an Ada programmer. I think that the more software (
especially more open source software ) in a specific language exists
the more programmers in this language are needed.

I was leaded to learn C/C++ because I wanted to understand how my
Linux box worked, seen that from the kernel to the vast majority of
the user applications have been written with those. So I started to
hack that C/C++ code.

There is nobody I know that need Ada programs, so why matter? Just for
fun, but not for more I suppose. If Linux and the user apps had been
made with Ada I would had begun to learn this beautiful language a
long time before.

>   So what is stopping ADA from being a language everyone knows? Is
>  it just viewed as old and arcane like COBOL and Fortran (no offense
>  to those that know these languages better than me)? Is it just lacking
>  some killer apps? Is it because most ADA is closed source, so there
>  are just not libraries out there (like a SSH library)?

Yes I do think so.

> Thanks,
> Chris

Ciao,
Fabio