Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 10:45:19 AM UTC-5, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> ... but could everyone take a step back and look at this thread. 
> 
> The OP had a valid concern, how to get different demographics to adopt. This thread just rambles on and on about another topics and most of it is OT bickering and I am the only person that has voiced any concern about getting young people to use Ada. 

I am the original poster.  I happen to adore this entire thread quite lovingly; it is almost exactly what I envisioned when I kicked it all off by making the original posting.  The only thing wrong with it is that there needs to be even more of it, especially regarding how to thoroughly disrupt the status quo in Ada by having her date some new marriage-minded suitors (e.g., Coq, VHDL, LLVM, melding Ada & Rust via pluggable modularity:  imagine Ada syntax plus opting into Rust's borrow-checker as PRAGMA SEMANTICS( BORROW-CHECKER ) or something like that).

What •you• consider ••off topic•• along all the branches of this thread, I consider ...

> What future is there for any language, programming or spoken, without young people involvement...

... to be ••topics that are frequently uninteresting to youth••.

Youth is typically attracted to shiny objects; I know because I was young once not all that long ago. Until Ada has (at least the beginnings of movement toward) a new shininess of some sort to glitter & sparkle danglingly in the sun, don't expect much fervent move-heaven-&-earth-to-get-there interest from youth.  All the existing old shininess in Ada is what attracted us decades ago when we were in our youth.  (My university taught most of its computer science classes using Ada1983 back in the 1980s.)

Btw, just because I like the existing so-called “off topic” branches of this thread, it would be interesting if you actually do keep posting along this thread with ideas for what would attract youth to Ada.  Perhaps you are seeing some low-hanging easy-to-pick fruit that the rest of us are missing.  To wit, if I were writing that book that you are proposing/writing, I would jettison as much of Ada1983 (lacking OO!) as possible, focusing instead on Ada1995 (with OO!) if you absolutely must narrow to one edition.  S. Tucker Taft's vision is far far far more palatable to youth's tastes than Jean Ichbiah's.  Also, I think that narrowing to one edition of Ada is entirely misguided unless that edition is Ada2012, because the book that needs to be written for youth/beginners is not the one you propose, but rather a 1000-page encyclopedia of Ada-by-recipes, lambasting other languages then showing the golden wonderfulness of Ada on that microtopic:
1) here are smart pointers in C++2017, but here is better memory management in Ada2012;
2) here is spooky mistake-making type inference in other languages (worst in C++2017, btw; see Scott Meyers's aforementioned horror book), but here is the better way of highly-readable literate-design in Ada2012;
3) here is UWP=WinRT programming in C++/WinRT and C++/CX, but here is the better way in Ada-WinRT;
4) here is multithreaded programming in Java, but here is the better way in Ada2012;
5) here are futures in C++2017 and here is the vastly better Grand Central Dispatch in Objective-C and Swift, but here is how to accomplish that same design in Ada;
6) here is a thread pool where all member threads pend competitively on a single message queue in POSIX threads in C, but here is how to better accomplish that same design in Ada2012;
7) here are clunky bitfields in C (and worse, there total absence in so many languages), and here is how to memory-map a nybble & bits register set of an FPGA or ASIC in Ada2012;
8) here is such-&-such convenient syntax in Python, Ruby, Perl6, Haskell, OCaml, etc, but here is the analogous convenient syntax in Ada2012.
9) here are the oft-proposed-never-standardized concept maps in C++ templates, but here they have existed for decades in Ada generics;
10) here are reactive extensions in C#, but here they are in RxAda;
11) here are each of the Gang of Four design patterns in other languages, but here they are done better in Ada2012;
and
12) so forth for hundreds and hundreds of microtopics in computer programming, where the tone can vary from we-got-that-too-isms to lambasting other languages' half-baked conceptual disasters in C++ and Java especially to lambasting Python/Ruby/Lua/Haskell/ML/F#/C#/Java/Kotlin on performance via actual empirical timing measurements on analogously-designed implementations in those languages versus Ada.

By writing such a 1000-page encyclopedia of Ada recipes for common programming microtopics, you will have crafted your own shiny object that youth will find attractive, because it is like a bound book form of StackOverflow.