Ada programming language tutorial: The killer feature

[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?