Re: Robert Dewar's great article about the Strengths of Ada over other langauges in multiprocessing!

["Phaedrus" <phaedrusalt@hotmail.com>]

> In the same way, nobody every wrote a GUI program in Ada, nor a
> networking program, nobody did any cryptography in Ada, etc. These
> languages are almost completely useless nowadays, sigh.

I guess that I qualify as "nobody" then, 'cause I chose to do my graphics 
work at UCLA in Ada.  The only piece of legacy code that was allowed was the 
ability to write a dot, not a line, to the screen.  Everything else was 
roll-your-own, and I did.  Wrote a nice matrix package, did all of the 
bilinear interprolation necessary for a nice shading algorithm, and had 3d 
objects spinning on the screen, with shading, and painter's algorithm. 
Looked pretty nice, too.

So, what did I learn from all this?  First, with rare exception you CAN 
write darn near anything in almost any language.  (I'll ignore Lisp for 
now.)  Second, I'd much rather write complicated structures in a language 
that makes it easier to understand those structures later.  (A good reason 
for ignoring Lisp.  And C++, and C#, and Java and assembly and machine 
code...)  If you can't figure out what it's doing at 3am, then it's probably 
too cryptic for general use, and you'd be surprised how much of your work 
will get done around that time.

By the way, I've done robotics projects in Ada, I've done a little crypto in 
Ada, I've done a fair amount of number crunching in Ada, and a LOT of 
realtime, embedded weapons work in Ada.  Oh, and my speciality is realtime 
3d graphics, piping out many frames per second with a nice GUI, and (with 
the exception of OpenGl) it's all in Ada.  My little company uses Ada almost 
exclusively, and we're very happy with the competitive advantage it gives 
us.

Sometimes it's nice being "nobody".

Brian

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:53e0fda7-a536-4899-a115-9d4e137ac698@13g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> On 9 Mar, 04:15, "Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter....@spam.acm.org>
> wrote:
>
>> You may have been writing multithreaded SW in C plus a threading library, 
>> or in
>> C++ plus a threading library, but you haven't been writing it in C or 
>> C++.
>
> You are right.
> In the same way, nobody every wrote a GUI program in Ada, nor a
> networking program, nobody did any cryptography in Ada, etc. These
> languages are almost completely useless nowadays, sigh.
> I accept this way of reasoning - but it does not change anything in
> the industry practice.
>
> --
> Maciej Sobczak * www.msobczak.com * www.inspirel.com