[cpp-threads] meta-question about Ada

[Nick Maclaren]

Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei at metalanguage.com> wrote:
> 
> Also, Ada hasn't caught on in the academia. Note that this is very 
> important. If Ada was interesting in any way, academists would be on it 
> like white on rice, as they've been on various languages of little 
> industrial appeal, such as Scheme, ML, Haskell, and the such. But a 
> Google Scholar search on "Ada" returns practically no relevant results, 
> and a search on "Ada tasks" returns papers from 1988, 1985, and 1983 as 
> its top three hits. So there is not *one* nut in some research lab or 
> university who loves Ada and works on it. (And believe me, in research 
> labs and universities you can find nuts working on the weirdest things. 
> The only precondition is that that things must somehow appear 
> interesting, at least to the nut.)

Sorry, but that is too simplistic.  Back in the early 1980s, a combination
of Reaganite (Thatcherite, here) dogma, incompetence in computing services
and the rise of the young Turks of modern 'computer science' led to two
things:

    The near elimination of computing services as a link between the
    computer scientists and practical use, and a related spinning off
    of much of 'computer science' into la-la land.

    The demise of what was originally called names like robust
    programming, and would now be called the nuts and bolts of
    software engineering.

Ranting on about how the latter can SAVE vendors money, and explaining
just how and why, is one of my hobby horses.  Despite increased uses
of the term RAS in a software context, things are still getting worse,
and there is no sign of the rot even slowing.

The reasons that Ada failed were different, and largely political, but
the reason that it is not taken seriously in academia is as I say :-(


Regards,
Nick Maclaren,
University of Cambridge Computing Service,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Email:  nmm1 at cam.ac.uk
Tel.:  +44 1223 334761    Fax:  +44 1223 334679