Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

["kevin cline" <kevin.cline@gmail.com>]

Martin Dowie wrote:
> Jerry Coffin wrote:
> > Pascal Obry wrote:
> >
> >>"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com> writes:
> >>
> >>
> >>>Your claim of fewer bugs is just the sort of unsupported anti-C
> >>>comment we see all the time.
> >>
> >>Just plain wrong, there is data (a PHD) see
> >>http://www.adaic.com/whyada/ada-vs-c/cada_art.html
>
> Ok, what about this paper:
> http://www.praxis-his.com/pdfs/c_by_c_better_cheaper.pdf
>
> In particular the company audited by the UK MoD on the 3rd page
showed
> interesting results. I work for the company audited and I'm sure the
> audit is post-1995 by some margin (when I was no longer working
there),
> and by your own argument, by 1990 the compilers were pretty close to
> standard C, yet this study still found a 10*defect rate in C than in
> Ada... and a 100* defect rate compared to SPARK...
>
> Yet, this sort of report seems all to common to me. Every language
since
> 'C' has had at least 1 report that shows how brilliant it is at
compared
> to 'C', yet 'C' is still the most widely spread language. Why?
>
> I think we perhaps need a psychologists view rather than looking at
> language differences. Are humans 'hooked' on tracking down /really/
> tricky null pointer dereference problems? Is it really just a fight
for
> 'silver back status' coz 'my programs compile to 1 long word less
than
> yours'?...

No, people are hooked on getting work done with what they perceive to
be the least possible effort and minimal risk.  So they pick what they
know, what their colleagues know, what has been known to work in the
past in their application domain.  Ada rarely enters the picture.  They
don't know Ada, no one they know uses Ada, no one they read advocates
Ada.

For a lot of commerical applications Perl or Python or Ruby or another
higher level language would be considerably better than Java, or C++,
or C#, but mostly they aren't used either.  Even though they are
considerably more popular than Ada, they still aren't popular enough
for risk-averse project managers.