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=-0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_PAST_24_48 autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,d5b211b0c1ffcf3e X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.204.149.210 with SMTP id u18mr483964bkv.1.1339704526952; Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:08:46 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Path: e27ni48519bkw.0!nntp.google.com!news1.google.com!news4.google.com!news2.google.com!npeer03.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.alt.net!news.dizum.com!sewer-output!mail2news From: Nomen Nescio Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development References: <28fb3117d9b184797cf3381d0240b765@msgid.frell.theremailer.net> Message-ID: <145eefe89c8eae1ef97489ba21b94d63@dizum.com> Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 23:34:23 +0200 (CEST) Mail-To-News-Contact: abuse@dizum.com Organization: mail2news@dizum.com X-Received-Bytes: 2252 Date: 2012-06-12T23:34:23+02:00 List-Id: Fritz Wuehler wrote: > Nomen Nescio 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.