From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c406e0c4a6eb74ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: fmdf@tiscali.it (fabio de francesco) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request Date: 11 Aug 2004 11:58:57 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.181.52.212 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1092250753 11678 127.0.0.1 (11 Aug 2004 18:59:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:59:13 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2681 Date: 2004-08-11T11:58:57-07:00 List-Id: 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