Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com>]

Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-201206.rodent.frell.theremailer.net> wrote:

> Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> wrote:
> 
> > > The length of time it takes to write a program isn't a valid metric.
> > 
> > Of course it is.  It's an accurate measure of the expressive power of
> > a language for the task at hand.
> 
> It isn't a metric that's useful to people who write Ada

You can replace "Ada" with any particular language, and the metric is
not useful to anyone where the language has already been decided on.

A metric can only be useful when using it for the right purpose.

> since it doesn't account for things like performance,
> maintainability, and most of all, correctness.

A single metric that captures many attributes is too blunt to be
useful for making engineering decisions.  Taking separate metrics,
each with a strong correlation to an attribute will give more useable
results.  

Metric's for expressive power are useful for comparing the languages
fitness for a particular purpose.  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.

> > I do not accept your idea that expressive power is inversely
> > proportional to maintainability, which is essentially what you're
> > trying to imply.  Makes no sense.  You can have your cake, and eat it
> > too.  
> 
> In practice that doesn't seem to happen very often and  Perl is not an
> argument for that view, quite the contrary.

Perl has nothing to do with the thesis you're trying to address.  Perl
was merely part of an example illustrating a different point that I
was making earlier.