Re: Carbon

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

Am 07.08.22 um 11:08 schrieb G.B.:
> On 06.08.22 16:18, dennis knorr wrote:
> 
>> * There's no modern book in german about modern Ada and its libraries
> 
> What's the competition, considering C#, Swift, Java or C?

from the absolute amount in english, these languages or python or rust
have more books. hell, even Raku has more books.

Python, Kotlin(!), C# have more german books and also more current ones.
I bet in five years from now there will be more german books about
Carbon than about ada, even if you include the old ones.

> I.e., an original work written by a German author, bought
> and studied by many?

and which is preferrably younger than 20 years.

> There used to be a number of books on Ada written in German when
> the market had developed ideas of a government mandate, the ideas
> producing corresponding opportunities.

Well, or people with knowledge could write books if they want to
distribute knowledge :)

>> * There's no syntaxhighlighting package in vim for ada
> 
> :syntax enable

okay, that i did not know.

> (Does vim feature in a modern feeling tool chain, though?)

Well, okay, intellij is called more modern of course or VSCode, but you
still can craft modern tooling onto vim and it works well.

>> * 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,
> 
> AWS, GNATColl, $ alr with json.

Well, yes. If you know them. Is there beginner documentation? and as i
said below my judgement is not entirely true, but for newbies to the
language it's not really visible.

>> algorithms or cryptography libraries)
> 
> Just use one that you can trust. If you need it to be more Ada-ish,
> ChaCha20 cipher and Poly1305 digest have just been mentioned a few
> postings ago. If algorithms can address securing the entire computation...

The deeper you dig with crypto the more problems you have. For example,
with TLS terminations, Chacha/salsa/Poly does not help you. Or you want
to interact with other data structures which implement AES with GCM or
you need cryptoprotocol elements for a KeyExchange, even without
implementing TLS?

Well, of course, i can use some C++ library, but first, debugging stuff
like that never worked well over language boundaries and i can "just use
C++" if i already use them.

> There used to be the PAL, which is the Public Ada Library, easy to find.
> A bit dated, and reflecting the hype back then, I guess.
> 
> I gather that, currently, and in the past, Ada tools are also focusing
> on topics of embedded computers, a fairly large and attractive market.
> JSON or MIME, perhaps even interpreters are present, but I think not
> central to control stuff near sensors and actuators. How does one compute
> deterministic responses before deadline using Node.js?

JSON or MIME are Dataformats. And it's not necessary throwing around
thinly veiled insults at other software ecosystems. He asked why Ada is
not more used or popular, i gave pointers, why people do not go to Ada,
but perhaps to Rust.

>> 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.
> 
> Can you say how many? I imagine a publisher asking this question.

That's a question most people who wrote books in the
$programming-language-books-section could not answer beforehand i guess.
and i mean, what is this question? Neither does it deconstruct my
argument, nor does it strengthen yours (if you have any). It sounds more
like the elitist perl programmers, who sneered at python because of the
REPL shell, that "a real language does not have or need a repl shell".
That was actually an opinion i read on IRC 6 years ago..

You do not have to like my opinion/experience/viewpoint but i really
would like to communicate that this exactly the reply i feared. not
because of the potential personal attack (which was not here), but
because of the elitist complacency. With attitudes like this, Ada will
only continue withering in the future.

No offense, jm2c and kind regards,
Dennis