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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "Harald Korneliussen" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? Date: 25 Jan 2007 02:13:09 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1169719988.972296.121430@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com> References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <20070123211651.c0d43695.tero.koskinen@iki.fi> <87zm89tpk7.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <4q4pqgmdwo.fsf@hod.lan.m-e-leypold.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.184.192.82 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1169719999 29504 127.0.0.1 (25 Jan 2007 10:13:19 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:13:19 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nb-NO; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com; posting-host=213.184.192.82; posting-account=5vUApw0AAADF5Kx_4-L9ZPdL9lZywYoQ Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8539 Date: 2007-01-25T02:13:09-08:00 List-Id: On 25 Jan, 09:37, Maciej Sobczak wrote: > Markus E Leypold wrote: > I think that > GNU luminaries (Stallman in particular) add to this mindset by > publishing web pages promoting C as the language of choice and the crowd > follows. I'm pretty sure Stallman has more love for Lisp and Scheme than C, given his background. I don't think it's a coincidence that the lexer amd parser, Bison/Flex, was something of the first they made for GNU, and that gcc, pretty uniquely among C compilers, has support for tail-call elimination and inner functions. Raymond is another case, and quite explicitly anti-Ada. (I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Larry Wall, the author of Perl, has something of a love/hate relationship with Ada. Didn't he first publish the diff algorithm in Ada way back when?) Anyway, I think individuals are less important than culture. You could read this straight out of the wikipedia page for C (until I changed it slightly ...): "the safe, effective use of C requires more programmer skill, experience, effort, and attention to detail than is required for some other programming languages." So if you use C, that means you are skilled, experienced and attentive, by some people's logic. It's a macho thing, "If you can't handle the power, don't use it!". Klingon programmers if there ever were any. It's of course a symptom of lack of professionalism: construction workers who are proud of what they do wear their helmets.