Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

["Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

On 11 Aug 2004 06:56:17 -0700, Chris Humphries <chris@unixfu.net> wrote:

>    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'm pretty sure the main reasons are: that there has never been a
(really) big corporation backing Ada, in the same way that many of the
languages you mention have had; that Ada is not a language suited for
or much liked by many non-professional programmers.

Microsoft have a huge historical investment in Basic (VB), C (in which
Windows was written (it was nearly Pascal)), C++ (in which they hedged
the future of their C codebase). They have poured vast resources into
developing and marketing tools supporting these languages. The latest
big thing from Microsoft is C#, and they have promoted it relentlessly.

Sun's fortunes were founded on Unix, so they have a huge vested
interest in the C language. They have done much to promote both. Lately,
Sun have placed all their faith in Java, and they have poured vast
resources into popularising it.

Languages such as Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and many others
have gained popularity with non-professional programmers, who are
several orders of magnitude greater in number than the professionals,
thus boosting the following of these languages to such large numbers as
to create their own unstoppable momentum. This is not to denegrate
non-pros, by the way; some of these languages are now used by pros, for
applications they are suited to. It's not to dengrate the languages,
either. I think Python and Ruby are both excellent designs.

>    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,

Ada isn't really an awesome or extremely powerful language. It has
many advantages over many other compiled imperative languages,
including C (and probably also C++, C#, and Java). It also has its
fair share of limitations and annoying quirks.

>  and it is just so easy to look at the code and tell what is going
>  on and what is what.

If the program is well written. C code /can/ be easy to look at etc.,
but it tends not to be in practice. Honestly, this is probably because
most C code is written by bad programmers, whereas most Ada code is
not. I have seen superb C code (often written by a non-pro, what is
more). Ada does /help/ the programmer to write good code.

>  It can be OO

Albeit a somewhat limited form of OO :-) Actually, Ada 2005 promises
to be much better in this area.

>  and can run tasks concurrently.

I think this is one of Ada's greatest strengths.

>  It's runtime and compile checking is awesome.

It's good, and certainly one of the biggest practical advantages of
the language. However, there are many other languages that have
good checking (C and C++ are notably not among them).

>  GNAT is free and available to all to use.

Yes, and GNAT is one of the language's biggest assets. It is of very
high quality, and is used in many commercial applications.

Programming languages are very much a case of horses for courses,
and there are many, many courses that Python and other languages are
far better suited to than Ada. For /some/ kinds of application
(typically embedded, systems, and safety-critical software) Ada is
one of the classiest acts in town.

I am currently considering Python or Ruby to write an XML
application, in preference to Ada, because it will probably be a lot
easier to write this kind of application in Python or Ruby, both
because of the languages themselves, and also because of the superb
utility libraries available for them.

Now, where did I put that asbestos suit?

-- 
Nick Roberts