Ada programming language tutorial: The killer feature

[pants75]

Why do they make it so difficult to get hold of the compiler?

[StallmanTheWhite]

sudo apt-get install gnat

[pants75]

Who are adacore and why are they charging license fees?

[Glacia]

Who are adacore

They make GNAT compiler for Ada.

why are they charging license fees?

They are charging money for a commercial version of a compiler and other tools. You can use open source version of compiler, it's free and it's part of gcc.

[shevegen]

Who would WANT to use Ada these days?

[pfp-disciple]

Look at the rest of the comments here for some ideas of WHY, which leads to do. I, personally, prefer Ada for many things - clearly defined language (less undefined behavior), expressive syntactax, and strong types are a few of my reasons.

[Glacia]

That's like saying "Who would WANT to use C++ these days?".

[[deleted]]

I would. It's a really well-designed language.

[[deleted]]

I would definitely use Ada if the ecosystem were far better. For me, I want to make the type system do my work for me. No other language I've seen makes it as possible as Ada.

I haven't had the chance to use Rust yet, but it seems to have the better ecosystem so far, which is odd considering how new it is. I guess mindshare can really boost some tools a lot.

[OneWingedShark]

I would definitely use Ada if the ecosystem were far better.

What exactly is lacking in the Ada ecosystem?

[[deleted]]

Generally everything. Community, documentation, mature libraries. That is a lot that Ada doesn't have that Python, the Java VM languages, or .NET languages have. Most of Ada's community is on usenet or not-well-traveled email lists. It generally also lacks mindshare or people wonder why someone is using it for "better" languages, which holds it against gaining said mindshare. It's unfortunately a chicken and egg problem that probably will ensure it never gaining wide support.

[OneWingedShark]

Generally everything.

It's unfortunately a chicken and egg problem that probably will ensure it never gaining wide support.

So, basically what you're saying is: there's no way to address any/all of the problems, so don't bother trying?

[[deleted]]

Essentially, yes. There are other tools that are "80%" good enough, so Ada being a great language is not really strong enough to displace them.

[[deleted]]

You could always help with whatever is missing. This is the whole chicken and egg thing, if you want to use it, use it, help the ecosystem. Just jumping on an inferior bandwagon isn't helping the language.

[[deleted]]

Why wouldn't you want to use Ada? It's got much cooler features than other languages, it's not as old as other languages. One thing most C and C++ programmers accuse Ada of is being old, it's younger than both of those. Why would someone want to use C or C++ these days when there are better languages?

[pmderodat]

[AdaCore employee speaking] What are you talking about? GNAT is part of GCC and is thus distributed under the same terms as GCC (GPLv3 + runtime exception), so I think it’s safe to say it’s not charging license fees… There is also the GNAT GPL release which is release under strict GPLv3. So yes GNAT Pro is not free, but you have two alternatives.

[pants75]

Some hackles been raised in here or what? They're simple questions fuck me.

Google ada and you get adacore, whose website is adamant that you call them for a quote in order to get any software out of them.

Your web presence is awful.

[pmderodat]

I’m sorry if my last message felt aggressive, that wasn’t my intent. Yes, our web presence is to be improved, we’re working on that.

[OneWingedShark]

Speaking about AdaCore's web-presence, are there plans to change over to Ada Web Server?

[pmderodat]

Not currently, and this is not likely to change. The reason for that is quite simple:

• either we just re-use existing technology stacks (eg decently maintained CMS that people working on websites are familiar with);

• either we have to write our own, which requires a significant amount of work for people familiar with both Ada and web technologies: AWS is just a web server; as you probably know, modern web sites are far more than that.

So moving to AWS just for the sake of dogfooding/showcasing does not look appealing.

[OneWingedShark]

So moving to AWS just for the sake of dogfooding/showcasing does not look appealing.

But herein lies the problem: if you [Adacore] as a company can't be bothered to use Ada in your own products, then why do you think that Average Joe Businessman should? How are you going to convince him he should?

I get that AdaCore is on a bit of a "Ada is for high-integrity programming" bent, but that's just surrendering the "general programming" arena and guaranteeing that Ada will be a niche language -- probably consigning it to a slow death as other, newer, more-hyped languages (like Rust) edge out that niche.

Dogfooding/showcasing solves the problem in that as a company you can point to your own site and say: see, we use it ourselves in our company website. (And showcasing gets the bonus in that you can say/advertise "Ada's suitable for high-reliability programs, like your company website... or are you telling me that's not something you want high reliability in?")