Re: Ada vs C++, Franz Lisp to the rescue?

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>I won't argue the point that Ada is far superior when it comes to large system
>development. This is a fact, plain and simple, and C++ cannot hold a candle
>to Ada's abilities to decompose a problem into managable pieces and insure
>the consistency between them. However, Ada is not all things to all programming
>tasks, and one of the things it isn't is an object oriented programming
>language.

From the above paragraph, we have these two statements:

1) Ada is a superior language for engineering large complex systems.
2) Ada is not particularly supportive of OOP.

These two statements lead to the following conclusion:

3) OOP is largely irrelevant when it comes to engineering large complex systems.

Now, far be it from me to actually MAKE this claim [;-)], I'm merely
pointing out that it is the inevitable subtext of the above paragraph.

Given that this claim has been made, I'm interested to see what sorts of
real-world data can be used to support or refute it. I keep hearing that
OO this and OO that are going to solve the software crisis and feed all
the world's children (much like structured programming was going to do
20 years ago...), but where is the DATA? How many practitioners of so-called
"pure" OO out there in net-land have success stories to tell about projects
on the order of 250KSLOC on up, preferably doing something difficult like
real-time process control or heterogeneous/distributed computing? And
the second, perhaps more important question I have is: on such projects,
to what degree did OO truly play a role (how much of the code was based
on inheritance and polymorphism, etc) vs more traditional programming
idioms?

I volunteer to provide success stories for similar projects successfully
completed NOT using "pure" OOP (data encapsulation and information hiding
were certainly used, but inheritance and polymorphism were not).
-- 
**************** JIM SHOWALTER, jls@netcom.com, (408) 243-0630 ****************
*Proven solutions to software problems. Consulting and training on all aspects*
*of software development. Management/process/methodology. Architecture/design/*
*reuse. Quality/productivity. Risk reduction. EFFECTIVE OO usage. Ada/C++.    *