Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[sbelmont700@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 8, 2014 1:25:00 PM UTC-4, Shark8 wrote:
> 
> So then, why aren't we-as-a-community doing that?
> 

Mostly because in a strongly typed system, *everything* has to be a generic.  And once you start in with generics, all the little gotchas and quirks make any sort of modestly-complex component next to impossible (or at least extremely unpleasant) to create.  So we, as a community, cannot easily divide up the work in a component like manner, and are usually forced to start all way down at the O/S interface level *for every single project*.  And again, even if you do manage to create an elegant Ada interface to OpenSSL, it's not going to be OpenSSL, because OpenSSL is an untyped C API that is anathema to everything Ada.  The better you make it, the further away from the standard you get, and the less people are going to want to use it.

FWIW, a focus on generics and creating *isolated* reusable components would be a good focus area for research, because currently it's essentially impossible.

-sb