Hello

I have started programming using ADA95, this being my first main programming language (outwith MS Visual Basic). I was just wondering if ADA95 is used a lot? and i am interested in what others think about this langauge and programs that have been created using it. Quite a general discussion, feel free to discuss any aspect of ADA95.

Thanks

Stu G.

Hello,
I good way I find what is useful is to see what the Industry is doing. The best way I think is to go to job posting website (like www.monster.com and www.dice.com) and do a search on a language.

I started this Ada95 discussion a while back but i would still like to know if many people use it and how it compares to other languages.

Post anything about Ada95 here really.

Cheers

Ada was my first programming language and I feel it was ideal for teaching me the fundamental tenets of cleanly structured, robust software design. It was my favorite for a long time, and I used it on quite a few different systems. Where it has the appropriate facilities on your particular platform, there's no reason not to use it for things like command-line programs.

But I would not turn to it for developing a GUI-based Windows or MAC program today. It never did evolve into a mainstream, well-supported GUI-development language toolset, on the level of C++, C# or Java. I personally felt that it's evolution into an OOP language with Ada95 was.. well, it didn't seem very intuitive to me after coming back to it from C++ at that time. And it suffered from what I would call "rigidity": I had to make up my own dynamically-changeable string and collection classes, and that was a pain to keep maintaining.

I would consider Ada's primary contribution was to advance the concepts of structured programming. Java and C# did inherit a rich legacy from Ada, and Microsoft's Transact-SQL (the language used for stored procedures within their database SQL Server) is loosely based on it. It's a useful language, but unless you're preparing for a DOD contract job it would not be the primary programming language that I would want to be versant in.