Hi all,
as some of you may know, after SIGAda was no more, there was a proposal to create a gobal group/association for the people that were part of SIGAda and everybody else that wanted. For that reason there was the proposal (which is now accepted) to create the new Ada Users Society.
Well… the website is up! https://ada-user.org/
However, you wont find much information as things are still brutally early, but keep an eye on it!
Best regards,
Fer
What else is likely to be on the website?
Ada User Society is intended to be a bit of a merger of SIGAda and Ada-Europe, plus a bit more. Ada-Europe will remain as the host of the Ada-Europe conference in the near term, and SIGAda will appear as a HILT technical committee within ACM SIGPLAN, but over time it is expected that Ada-User will emerge as the primary “user voice” of the Ada community. We hope to initiate a user-driven “blog” series as a somewhat more curated set of success (and failure!) stories, perhaps incorporating some of the past Ada Gems series. Some of the content of the AdaIC.org might also migrate to Ada-User.
@JeremyGrosser and I agree this might be a good organization to transfer ada-lang.io to, along with the Github organization.
Following this very closely and very excited about it, I’m in the US andDefinitely interested in joining.
I would like some assurances that ada-lang.io doesn’t end up falling into the 90s
What kind of activities would you host ? My finances are virtually non-existent but I train to be a software engineer. At least I can join for free ?
What do you mean ? When the .su domain disappeared with the USSR ?
They are referring to how a lot of Ada websites from the past used a similar bare bones look and feel reminiscent of the 90s era web page design (mostly because they were made back then and not updated visually). Stuff like the now abandoned: https://www.adahome.com/
Pretty much what @jere said 
I like that ada-lang is a modern site that’s spearheaded and updated by the community, and I would just like it to continue helping us show our best face.
With that being said I think this is a really good route forward, and the same also can apply to Alire.
A problem with a lot of the tooling infrastructure we have right now in Alire is that we’re reliant on Github Actions. Since github actions doesn’t support certain hardware/OSes, we don’t have them in Alire.
The approach groups like the Rust Foundation takes to solve this with their projects (e.g. rustup) is to offload some of that to their own infrastructure. For example I’d happily turn GetAda over to the Ada User Society if we could get the binaries hosted on their own shares.
A more recently created website is the one for the Ada Rapporteur Group:
This was built using Google Sites.
I really wish you hire some graphic artists for logo’s.
As an aside, I personally don’t mind the 90’s look and feel for sites that use it. I know it bothers a lot others though.
as long as it is usable, I prefer it too. Minimalism is the key word. But I find hilarious that some believe it is very important and has an impact on how likely developers are to consider this language.
To be frank, Ada and us are better off without the kind of person whose choice look & feel of websites would really weight in.
First impressions count. This website understood that, that’s why it exists. Go look at what people think of Ada based on the ancient looking websites, it’s not good.
To be fair, we have video evidence of this in action. A lot of Tsoding’s dive into Ada was marred with him giving up on sites like this. Some of it self inflicted, but I think some was valid criticism.
I’m generally very weary of going down this path of thought. From personal experience, look and feel can completely change my ability to read the page. I have a vision impairment so look and feel is very important to my ability to even parse the information effectively. In general I don’t consider look and feel a reason not to try a website, but it often does affect my ability to use it. I don’t generally begrudge others for this reason.
For example I have extreme difficulty reading the version of the RM formatted on this website. The old ARG version is much easier for me to visually parse.
I’ll never deny ergonomy, nor that it is poorly thought off usually. And I use the word “usable”, which AdaHome is not, it looks like a hobo under meth did it. But I abhor the modern tendency of putting drop-down menus, animations, javascript and a dozen shades of colors everywhere.As for tsoding, I can’t take seriously someone on ergonomy when they write Haskell. I get a conjonctivite by looking at this syntax for more than 5 minutes ! Classic unix “coder” look too…
I think they did a fantastic job with ada-lang.io and the new RM display. Did you try with dark mode on ?
I primarily view most pages in dark mode. One of the more annoying features of my impairment is that it causes me to see shadows overlayed on everything that close to other things (generally text). Darkmode inverts most things which is much easier for me to see (the shadows tend to obscure less stuff since it is mostly the background that is dark).
My main problem with the RM is that even in dark mode it places the text in lighter colored blocks where the shadows are more visible making it harder to read. There’s also a few places where there are too many blocks squished together but that is less of an issue than the light colored block backgrounds.
Most people, including me, don’t like contrast to strong. But I think you want the css media feature forced-color. Makes those colored boxes disappear. Unfortunately the support is laughable on chrome and chrome derivatives, unless triggered from within developper tools.
You get the same result by forcing the color palette on firefox.
Hmm. Not only do I like the ARG’s website’s design, I really like it, and it doesn’t seem particularly 90s, either. Even the CSS responsiveness is pretty good.
We are hoping to revamp the display of the reference manuals, so we will look for your feedback @jere as well as from others as the new versions come online.
Also, have you checked out the nice version mentioned above on ada-lang.io, such as this page:
In dark mode, I don’t see any lighter colored blocks once the annotations are suppressed (toggle in upper right corner to turn them on/off).
In any case as mentioned above, we hope to produce some new web displays of the various RM versions, and would appreciate your feedback.
I hope for you to produce epub versions of those same documents.