Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Kevin Cline <kevin.cline@gmail.com> wrote:
: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message news:<cgn7bm$snk$3@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>...

:> : But Ada has been almost universally ignored by the Computer Science
:> : research community.
:> 
:> Could you give some examples?

: An example of what?  Of computer scientists who do not program in or
: teach Ada?

I had thought of Computer Science research. When it deals with
concurrent execution in language studies or in programming oriented
presentation, or the development of programming languages,
there seems to be a certain awareness of Ada, even of proteced types,
for example.



Quite a few people I've met didn't like Ada because of they have
seen it as associated with the political, military, and industrial
organisations mentioned in Richard Riehle's posting. Indeed,
if computer languages and compilers do not care about the purpose
of a program, people do. (This is a reason why I'm somewhat uncomfortable
using Ada, sometimes. The military and the weapon makers seem to
be so close... ;-) People also judge languages not only by
their technical merits or by how well you can express ideas
in code. They appear to be influenced largely by the (non-technical)
reputation of a language, by watching the peer group for acceptable
pet languages, or "in"-languages, etc.

(For example, Robert Axelrodt (The Complexity of Cooperation, 1997,
Princeton University Press)
recommends some languages to his students/readers. He compares C,
FORTRAN, (Visual) Basic, Pascal, and C++. LISP, and some math languages
are mentioned in a footnote. "LISP ... is especially
good for handling data structures and programs interchangeably".
...  "My advice is to avoid FORTRAN" ... "is an old language that
is not as convenient to use as the others." ... "If a friend or
coworker is available to answer questions about Pascal, for example,
pick Pascal. ... designed to be a first language for serious
programmers. It is easy to learn, and is structured to encourage good
programming habits. Most of simulations in this volume were programmed
in Pascal." ... C is the most common procedural language among
serious programmers." ... "C++ was chosen as the foundation for the
Java programming language" ... "If you are fairly sure that you will
be doing programming for some time and want to start with a language
that you can grow with, then C or C++ is the best choice."

It would be interesting to know how influential this book is.
But what will people who know these languages say about the
comments? In particular, the "or" in the last relative clause
is misinformation that if spread leads to a serious misconception
in my view. (If you look at the FORTRAN code,
http://pscs.physics.lsa.umich.edu/Software/ComplexCoop.html,
you get an idea of why the author, referring to FORTRAN's "age and
prior popularity" still says no to FORTRAN in 1997.)


-- Georg