What is the crowd's opinion of
Ada?
From 3.5 billion comments
4 reviews of this app found across the web:
As marc-kd writes, we get to work with Ada. :-)
It feels good to be able to make the compiler help you find errors. It is a standard feature that you will get told off for trying to access an array element outside the declared index range. But it is also easy to get it to check for more advanced things such as physical units or other constraints you might decide to put on your data types.
It is also my impression that the restrictions on program structure in Ada helps me select more sensible system architectures than what I might otherwise attempt.
You could check out <http://www.ada2012.org/passion.html> for more comments. - You should note that several of the people quoted are developers on the GNU Ada compiler, so they may be slightly biased.
Ada's a great language! It's main focus is Engineering. It's used a lot in Aviation and Aerospace. Basically, if something has to be done correctly, Ada's the language of choice. Make the best of it, you won't be sorry.
Here is a video of a few people hyping Ada. http://www.ada2012.org/passion.html
As far as help, check out the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.ada
You can begin here
but really its good to get the fundamentals down first, there are many resources you can do this from. The language has slowly evolved over time, but you can still compile ADA 83 on a 2012 compiler.
You can see what features came in the different revisions here
http://www.ada2012.org/comparison.html
I would actually learn them in that order, start with the Ada 83 features like packages, types, IO, tasking, generics and go on from there
I thought by looking at this chart that Unicode support in Ada 2012 is quite complete, but then on #irc is was told that 'String Encoding package' does not provide su much to make one's app ready for l10n and i18n. However, asking on gtkada mailing list about it, I got the answer saying: "You should use GtkAda.Intl", so I wonder if that replaces the need for using 3rd party libs like Matreshka?