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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: What is wrong with Ada?
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:02:19 +0200
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Date: 2007-04-10T23:00:52+02:00
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On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 16:32 +0200, Markus E Leypold wrote:
> Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> writes:

> > Another way to put it, let me ask : What's wrong with
> > developers ? Why do they like unsafe languages ? 
> I think I already answered that.

> > Why do they like fighting a language all the time?
> Well -- difficult to say:...

> > Why do they like unreadable code?
> > Why do they like to play with a debugger ? 
> 
> Good question....

> THIS post is
> absolute nonsense and not worthy to yourself.

Erh, `already answered', `difficult to say', `good question'
and then `post is nonsense'??? Seems like another opportunity
of addressing a few important observations of an alleged 
programmer sample has been missed.

Suppose I try to frame Pascal's questions with notions of programming
extracted from the Windows/VB/Excel/ASP world, or from the
PHP/Perl/apache world and mix them with the (stereo-)typical
Ada or C++ surroundings, what will I be comparing?

A good starting point might be to see what programming in a
(stereo-)typical shop means. A construed tentative grouping
is
- "scripting shops" (Perl, PHP, Python, ASP, ...)
- "forms shops" (VB, Delphi, C#, ...)
- "accounting shops" (Cobol, APL, Java, ...)
- "observation shops" (C, Fortran, Ada, ...)
- "media shops" (don't know :-/ ...)
and
- "vehicle and missile control shops" (C, C++, Ada, ...)

And if we compare the mean programmer skill in the respective
shops listed above, can we reasonably expect to find means
that differ significantly? Or can we at least expect to find
per-shop-quantiles that show some structure in the distribution of
skill that is different in each shop type?

I can follow Pascal's questions as an expression of a valid observation,
maybe even an observation with sufficient statistical reliability. On
rare occasions of reading some computing history literature, I find that
younger programmers like clever solutions more than programmers who have
grown older.  Ada culture puts cleverness at a different level of
abstraction, other kinds of harmful low level cleverness are delegated
to the C culture. Knowing clever {}-culture solutions still saves you
the trouble of adding business critical obfuscation.