Re: Ada requires too much typing!

[Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-201005.rodent.frell.theremailer.net>]

Like anything you need to strike a balance. As many people know, Ada was
designed to be read. It is one of the best in that regard, probably only
COBOL comes close and it's not nearly as powerful.

Extremes in the the direction of terseness are APL and Perl. They can be
impossible to read. Sometimes even reading code you wrote last week is
hard. I'm sure there are others but those two come to mind at the moment.

People mostly lack discipline and gravitate towards lazy practices. C++
coders often call Ada (if they even hear about it) verbose. It's silly, but
I really don't care. It's their problem, not ours. Sloppy code can be
written in any language, and unfortunately it's proven in practice. Still,
sloppy code in some languages is easier to understand than others, but Ada
makes it harder than average to write sloppy code that's also wrong.

There's also the matter of aesthetics. Most programming languages
(especially C and Java and their offspring) are just ugly. I prefer ALGOL
and its derivatives, in my view they're prettier, cleaner, and better. To
each his own, but don't expect me to read your crap if you code it in C,
C++, or Java!