From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.unit0.net!newsreader5.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!peer01.ams1!peer.ams1.xlned.com!news.xlned.com!peer03.am4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!peer02.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2018 15:15:21 -0500 Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re:_How_to_get_Ada_to_=e2=80=9ccross_the_chasm=e2=80=9d?= =?UTF-8?Q?=3f?= Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <1c73f159-eae4-4ae7-a348-03964b007197@googlegroups.com> From: Norman Worth Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2018 14:15:20 -0600 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1c73f159-eae4-4ae7-a348-03964b007197@googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-5BA6yRmXeSmD3d9xbOk+xRK7X7sLMFfhzb1f931jyhClMpnOZseXvamLDU0dre7BOZN/GJ24mkqkDSz!2+tyBgQJStcfIrA4H4Z/TadPyGbt4AT274WHtagVOLPAaGd4ulWlRIIlZi9exItJLxIvfk8vmK8e X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 4427 X-Received-Bytes: 4670 X-Received-Body-CRC: 2208711853 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:51851 Date: 2018-04-30T14:15:20-06:00 List-Id: Dan'l Miller wrote: > http://cppdepend.com/blog/?p=994 > > “According to Moore, the marketer should focus on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to the next group. The most difficult step is making the transition between visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority).” > > Do we all agree that Ada has never quite crossed the chasm (although it almost did during the late 1980s)? How can Ada cross the chasm? > > How will Ada use one base of programmers/software-engineers as a basis to move onto convincing another group of programmers/software-engineers of Ada's advantages? Or is the purpose of Ada to preach to its current choir without trying to fill the pews with new parishioners? > I think one of the reasons Ada did not catch on in a really big way was the lack of a sponsor. Yes, DoD was a sponsor in the early days, and they did a great job of defining the philosophy and launching the language. But they gave up and mostly abandoned the language. This was in large part because contractors and the corporate world refused to use Ada (in part because the programmers thought being labeled as an Ada programmer would mean their skills would be unmarketable). Also, DoD sponsorship is a limited niche, you need a few corporate biggies to sign on and support the language. (DoD also sponsored Jovial, an excellent language for its time, that persisted into the 1990s but was never available outside DoD.) Several big companies gave it a brief look, but decided that the market was too limited or the language was too complicated for practical use. Several universities adopted Ada as their primary language for teaching programming, but lack of support caused most of them to abandon it. There are many objections to Ada. It is a very large language, and is quite fussy. People think that makes it hard to learn and hard to use. Those who use it know that you first learn a practical subset and use it, learning and adopting additional features as you encounter problems that need them. This is particularly effective in a team programming environment where you get peer reviews of your code, a great leaning tool. I have heard complaints about Ada's wordiness. This is true - Ada is almost as verbose as COBOL. But it is readable, and that wordiness also contributes to its reliability. People think it generates poor and inefficient machine code. Wrong, at least for the couple of compilers I've used. It is particularly more efficient than the interpretive languages that are currently popular. People say it makes the development cycle too slow, that it takes too much time to write a working program. In today's get it out the door today, without much testing, world, that may be true. But reliability does count for something on the bottom line. People complain that modern tools that make for a productive shop are not available. They are, but maybe not in the style and variety some want. In general, Ada is just not popular. It was never given the chance to gather a large following.