Re: Ada: A beginners experience

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 2018-07-14 04:36, blakemichael073@gmail.com wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
>   I thought that I would offer a quick beginners insights into the Ada world.
> First off, a little background, I am a mature aged first year electronics/automation engineering student that has taken an interest in real time control systems. This has lead me to interest in the Ada language.
> I have read books/tutorials that have been written by posters to this group and I am grateful for the resources that are available. I have been trying to learn to program micro-controllers.

OK, but that is a strange and hardest method to get into.

Strange, because automation systems tend to walk away from 
"microcontrollers" in the sense of a bare-metal-16-bit-1K thing. You can 
comfortably do everything on an ARM board running Linux.

>   I have watched the thread on "Why isn't Ada more popular" and thought that I would give my perspective. Trying to learn to use Ada without the assistance of someone experienced is hard. There are so many problems along the way, and much of the available documentation assumes background knowledge that most learners would try something easier.
>   It would seem that the current strategy is to hope that once beginners are experienced enough using arduino or C that they will see the error of their previous ways and convert to the Ada language. I would argue that to make Ada more popular the barriers to using Ada need to be lowered. At the moment I spend too much time trying understand how to make my tools work, and not enough time using my tools.

Integrating Ada in the Ardiuno framework is a bit different thing. I 
agree that it will be very cool not to be forced to program it in C. But 
the problem would be having binding to thousands of C libraries used to 
deal with the hardware. It is a huge work with almost no practical use 
in the end except for showing presence.

And it is not a quite good starting point, because, IMO, learning Ada 
for automation and control must start with tasking and protected objects.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de