Re: Carbon

[dennis knorr <dennis.knorr@gmx.net>]

Am 29.07.22 um 01:48 schrieb Nasser M. Abbasi:

> May be there is something in Ada that preventing it from being
> widely adopted and used?

An opinion from bystander who wants to like Ada, this is only after i
looked the resources and the community up a bit two years ago again. you
do not have to agree, it's just my experience and sometimes gut feeling.

* Bad to no marketing
* sometimes elitism by members of the community/Ada fans
* no modern feeling toolchain (Even Lazarus+Pascal or Gambas has a more
modern feeling toolchain, and that says alot)
* not much free software built with it
* not much free software for the toolchain available
* not much libraries which are ready and easy to use as a beginner
* no modern/up2date books and articles (especially in other languages
than in english) seem to be available.
* the free Ada Compiler seems slow and a while back it generates
relatively big binaries and the result was not very fast.

Just a few concrete examples to back that up:
* Is there a web playground or repl shell trying or learning/trying Ada
or some of its prominent modules?
* There's no modern book in german about modern Ada and its libraries
* There's no syntaxhighlighting package in vim for ada
* No exercises like for example Ruby Koans
* It *Looks* like there are no libraries which make it easy use Ada for
programming (think json/document formats, http/mail/mime protocols,
algorithms or cryptography libraries)


I know there are libraries out there, but they are hard to find, not
promoted/marketed and i saw developers (also in other languages, i admit
that) talking like, if you do not understand it, you should go back to
toylanguages like python.

i also know that not all bulletpoints above are really true to the
fullest, but most of them from the outside look like it and also have at
least some grain of truth in there.

If someone would write a book in german, how to write Ada and use
$cryptolibrary, $networklibrary and how to integrate it in ones favorite
development software, this surely would be very interesting too many.

The ONLY thing where i see Ada Marketing in the free software world is
FOSDEM. But it is in its own Room. Ada people would need to go out and
say: hey, look we also can do good stuff, look, an https server with
letsencrypt support with library in 30 lines..

To be honest, i am curious how the community here will react on it. I
mean, i got the Book "Programming in Ada 2005" as a present and i liked
it, but after reading the introduction (first 2-3 chapters i think) back
then (was like over 15 years ago) i saw no libraries which i can use.
and i was not that big a programmer to write them myself.

Jm2c,
Dennis