From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.5 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_05 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED.2uCIJahv+a4XEBqttj5Vkw.user.gioia.aioe.org!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Learning Ada Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 13:09:54 +0200 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: <1dab8412-0ff6-4081-b973-783167a37e6cn@googlegroups.com> <620a8fb2-758c-4bca-b4d3-f2e49fce3703n@googlegroups.com> <871rj2cy61.fsf@nightsong.com> <211a3c48-447a-4d23-840d-d868da44f740n@googlegroups.com> <87tuvyourl.fsf@samuel> NNTP-Posting-Host: 2uCIJahv+a4XEBqttj5Vkw.user.gioia.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.12.0 Content-Language: en-US X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:60162 List-Id: On 16/09/2020 12:55, Ludovic Brenta wrote: > Jack Davy writes: >> The more I look at this language the more I wonder why it isn't more >> popular. Maybe people just don't like the pascalish syntax, but that >> never put me off because I learned Turbo Pascal at Uni (25 years ago) >> and more recently Free Pascal/Lazarus. Never was much of a fan of the >> curly bracket languages. > > I wasn't there when it happened but I read that early Ada 83 compilers > were buggy, slow and outrageously expensive because marketed only at one > captive customer, the US DoD. (In their defence, Ada is a prticularly > difficult language to implement well, orders of magnitude more so than > Pascal or C). The vendors never really tried to sell Ada development > tools outside the military, despite hype that Ada was the language of > the future. At around the same time, C++ used the opposite strategy of > selling cheap compilers, with the additional advantage of backward > compatibility with C, so they won market share. Turbo Pascal was a > contender back then but only on DOS and Windows, so it ultimately lost > to C++, possibly in no small part because of Borland's refusal to abide > by any portable standard. And then Sun marketed Java aggressively with > a zero-cost compiler and promises of ultimate portability, and stole the > show. > > The Ada landcsape changed dramatically when the first Free Sofwtare Ada > 95 compiler, gnat, arrived, but the damage to the reputation of Ada was > very hard to overcome. An entire generation of military and corporate > programmers, frustrated by the early compilers, became managers and > dismissed Ada out of hand for decades. They and their prejudices have > started to retire in the past few years and I think this is one factor > in the current renaissance of Ada. I mostly agree with your analysis, except the last part. The problem is that the culture of programming and overall education became so low that it is no more a race against C++. C++ itself is in defense and losing against languages and practices so overwhelmingly bad that even C looks as a shining beacon. Winter is coming. -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de