Why Not Ada?

David M. Press asks: "Why is it that Ada 95 is not in greater use in Open Source projects? It can compile to machine code or java bytecode, it has built-in tasking (threading), it supports both the procedural and object-oriented paradigms, and it is very human-readable (based off of pascal syntax). And best of all, the GNAT project (based off of GCC) provides a fully conformant Ada 95 compiler for multiple platforms. What more can you ask for?" Good point. Is Ada just a victim of obscurity or are there real reasons not to use it?

Comments

Culture

[remande]

A lot of people have given a lot of technical reasons for not choosing Ada. However, I think that there is one, larger reason for this. Ada has been considered beneath contempt by most geeks since before most geeks were coding. It's one of those things that we are supposed to hate as a matter of culture. I've read a bunch of stuff about how it is built by committee with all the problems thereof, but I've never actually seen it, and I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have used it.

If you don't hate Ada and COBOL, you get shunned by hackerdom. You are allowed to code in either, but must swear loudly while doing so. People who actually choose to generally get discounted as idiots.

I'm not saying that the above is right, but only that the above is so.

GNAT

[CFN]

Having done my undergraduate CS at NYU, the 'N' in the Gnu Nyu Ada Translator (GNAT - how many people knew that), and having studied under two of the developers of that system (their company's site) I was fortunate enough to be exposed to virtues of this language.

The Ada syntax is very similar to Pascal's, but the language is very similar to Java (especially thread support). Once you get accustomed to using the language, you notice that you can be very, very productive using it, much more than in C++. I would also say that the learning curve (minus the time to familiarize yourself with the syntax if you are coming from the C/C++ world) is pretty easy to climb, and you can be proficient at it soon.

For my compiler class, we needed to write a compiler for a (the non OO) subset of Ada95. I chose to write mine in Ada95, because we were allowed to use the GNAT lexer/parser (which was written in A95 as well). I would strongly recommend that anyone wanting to learn large scale programming or who is developing something that will be open source, should take a look at the source code. It is clearly written, well documented, easily understood, and even beautiful. It is a wonderful example of how someone should write code if the expect others to read it. It also shows just how beautiful and understandable the language is.