I would like to start by saying that from what I can see here in Copenhagen right now, Ada has a reasonably bright and growing future (even though the government has cancelled the Rømer sattelite project). An aquaintance and I have recently managed to start an Ada SIG in the local Linux User Group, SSLUG, with (reasonably) regular meetings and continously growing interest. (but maybe it simply helps to start from a low level) Wojtek Narczynski wrote: > Ada should be freed from its traditional, narrow domain of > application. Agreed. Only a fraction of the participants in our Ada SIG have primarily an interest in writing embedded software. > Having said the above, here is my personal list of > obstacles I've encountered trying to practice what I've > preached above: > > 1. Containers (/Collections). Once you are done with > Hello_World, and try to write some real software you > really get stuck on this. There are dozens of libraries > varying in scope and quality, but there is no standard, > not even a clear leader. The variety is often killing > reuse efforts, because two pieces of software use > different container code, and won't interoperate. Every > self-respecting company / developer has a homegrown > solution. It's worse than that. I find it hard to decide which of the container/ADT classes I have access to I should use, so it is not the same one every time. ;-) - or maybe :-( > 2. Interface to underlying operating system, especially > socket programming. There is FLORIST for POSIX binding but > the most important part - socket connectivity - has big > warning that it is by no means complete / stable. You have > to use GNAT.Os_Lib and GNAT.Sockets that do good job for > that, but are not standard. Plus there are at least three > other libraries. Maybe one (or some) of us should sit down and make the FLORIST sockets work. As it is right now, I manage quite fine with AdaSockets, but I can certainly see the point in using POSIX sockets instead. > 3. Openness. I've got the impression that there are > millions of lines of code that could be open sourced. Yes. But how much of it is interesting? I have around 6 Mb of home-grown Ada code, which I can publish under an Open Source license. But how many people would be interested in software for processing 3D particle tracks? Or yet another Ada pretty-printer (which isn't very good btw)? Or software for creating fractal LEGO landscapes? (well, that one has actually been published) Or a simulation of a double-slit experiment? (sold that one, so there was some interest) I wouldn't mind making all my own Ada code available under an Open Source license, but I am not sure the benefit is large enough to make the time I would have to spend on it worthwhile. > 4. Little Ada education at the universites. I can certainly agree on that. But what can we do about it? (I will not be working at a university for the next two years, and I am a physicist, not a computer scientist or software engineer) > I am sure Ada can sell well, becuase reliability of > software can sell. People have had enough of BSODs of > different sorts already. I am positive that there are > enough people capable of understanding, for example, why > it is important not to use int for storing day count. This > is not that hard after all. Some people are as far as I can see slowly getting the point. Jacob -- SSLUG's julekalender - hver dag fra den 1. til den 24. december http://www.sslug.dk/julekalender/