From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-65-14.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00,T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: John McCabe Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Carbon Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 11:03:36 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 11:03:36 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader01.eternal-september.org; posting-host="078c0e3bba62720daa8b69ba497a0dc5"; logging-data="3664203"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19HZ/0p3ap9uS71mgRPuSMjp9F3GWWEymQ=" User-Agent: Pan/0.147 (Sweet Solitude; 97d1711 github.com/GNOME/pan.git) Cancel-Lock: sha1:JD84zZKA5w7LaazUq9lcXDJwjL8= Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:64160 List-Id: On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:48:49 -0500, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote: > On 7/27/2022 3:00 PM, Luke A. Guest wrote: >> On 27/07/2022 18:24, John McCabe wrote: > >>> few things that I'm unhappy with in C++ that, in Ada, are "solved" and >>> have been for decades. The result is that someone who appears to have >> >> Yup. >> >> > Since Ada has solved these problems long time ago, then why are people > still re-inenting the wheel? Why are they not just using Ada? Ada is > free software. Possibly for the same reason that I was so anti-Ada in my early years; it takes getting used to and people are lazy. Looking at some of the languages that have come out in recent years, it's obvious that people can't be bothered to type much; "fn"/"def" (or, even, nothing!) instead of "function"/"procedure", "{"/"}" instead of "begin"/"end", "&&" instead of "and", "||" instead of "or" (!!!) etc. >From what I can see, some of the "moderators" on that Carbon group don't have much real professional software development experience, so I suspect they really have no clue about what they could achieve with Ada, and have little understanding of some of the contraints that embedded, especially bare-metal, systems impose on what you can and can't include in a program. I'm thinking here of things like heap-unfriendly container classes, such as (in Swift) arrays that are automatically expandable when you append a new item, rather than being fixed size etc. There also seems to be a bit of an obsession with the time between "empty editor window" and "executable available", rather than "empty editor window" and "executable that actually does what you want"! Also, as Devin says, compiler availability is an issue, from the point of view of actually _using_ Ada. However, from the point of view of creating a new language, the fact that so many people clearly think it _has_ to be the C/C++ way is quite disturbing, especially since, as I think I mentioned, it's going to be a number of years until any new language really makes its mark, so new languages should be taking future developers into account, not just pandering to the laziness of existing ones! At this point I think I should make it clear that, although I think Ada has some great features (and I regularly espouse them amongst my colleagues), I don't use Ada in the software I'm developing. I'd like to, but it would take me a lot of time to get back to a level in Ada where I'd be comfortable creating a relatively substantial codebase from scratch. The alternative would be to go and join a team that's already using Ada, but every Ada job I've seen come up locally is to support code that was written in Ada 95; I'd rather be looking at Ada 2005 -> if I was to make that jump.