Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

fmdf@tiscali.it (fabio de francesco) wrote in message news:<ba2f9c57.0408211523.389cf201@posting.google.com>...
> "Richard  Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<tJqVc.7839$3O3.4242@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>...
> > "Kevin Cline" <kevin.cline@gmail.com> wrote in message
> > news:e749549b.0408200838.43e841d@posting.google.com...
> > 
> > Kevin,
> > 
> > I have read your reasons for preferring C++ over Ada,
> > and appreciate that you have looked at this matter
> > with diligence and an honest sense of inquiry.   Because
> > of my confidence in the intelligent approach you took
> > to reach your conclusions, I will not presume to persuade
> > you to depart from your position.
> 
> What intelligent approach? He (Kevin) was able(?) to demonstrate that
> some of the most interesting and powerful features of Ada represent
> its major faults. I think He simply doesn't understand how to use
> those features for achieving the better results and for the clever
> maintaining of programs.

I programmed in Ada-83 for two years before starting with C++.  I knew
Ada-83 inside-out, and stressed it enough to find bugs in both the
Verdix and Telesoft compilers.  Unfortunately, most of the claimed
advantages of Ada just don't make much of an impact on the
applications I have worked on over the past 25 years.  And there are
few features of Ada that can't be duplicated by writing a C++ template
class.  OTOH, there is no way in Ada to produce the equivalent of
sophisticated C++ libraries like the Boost spirit parser.

> I don't think so. It shouldn't be just a matter of personal preference
> or a matter of taste. I have begun to think that in order to really
> understand, appreciate and use Ada, someone is to have some more
> experience, open mind and a more vast computer science background than
> that we commonly find in the average programmer. 

But Ada has been almost universally ignored by the Computer Science
research community.