From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,d5b211b0c1ffcf3e X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.68.223.40 with SMTP id qr8mr2107867pbc.0.1339672349403; Thu, 14 Jun 2012 04:12:29 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Path: l9ni49666pbj.0!nntp.google.com!news2.google.com!npeer03.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.alt.net!news.dizum.com!sewer-output!mail2news From: Nomen Nescio Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development References: <145eefe89c8eae1ef97489ba21b94d63@dizum.com> Message-ID: <0a1dd240429895fc5eaa36ade9b47e47@dizum.com> Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:12:20 +0200 (CEST) Mail-To-News-Contact: abuse@dizum.com Organization: mail2news@dizum.com X-Received-Bytes: 2637 Date: 2012-06-14T13:12:20+02:00 List-Id: > Metric's for expressive power are useful for comparing the languages > fitness for a particular purpose. I don't agree. Expressive power is useful for comparing the /ease/ of applying the language for a particular purpose. Domain specific languages are always easy to apply to the problem domain, by definition. But that is not the whole story. How easy it is to apply the language to solving a particular problem doesn't take into account other possibly overriding factors like maintainability, performance, etc. In other words, just because it's easy to code a particular solution in a certain language doesn't mean that language is ideal or even good for that solution in other respects. Domain specific languages are often lacking in industrial strength features, and are best for prototyping or programming in the small. To take your point to the extreme, Perl and most other modern scripting languages would never have had to be written, since SNOBOL4 from the late sixties is more expressive and powerful than those new languages. But we see there are other overriding concerns like facilities to handle large source projects, the ability to employ namespaces, and other aspects of the newer scripting languages that trade off the power and expressiveness of SNOBOL4 for modern management features and OO constructs, etc. > E.g. if the purpose is filtering e-mail, it would be foolish to neglect to > consider the language that probably has the single most expressive power > for that kind of job (the procmail language). The language was in fact > specially designed just for that purpose. SNOBOL4 can filter better than any language I have seen. If you're not happy with that, most modern scripting languages have regexp facilities. What makes one better than the other? There are other factors that lead us to choose this or that language, and ease of application is helpful but not essential. What's essential is a correct, serviceable solution that performs adequately. As long as a baseline functionality to get the job done exists in your solution set of languages, you should consider other features that make writing and maintaining good code easier.