Re: Build language with weak typing, then add scaffolding later to strengthen it?

[jan.de.kruyf@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 9:52:39 AM UTC+2, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> And how well would a team of student manage John McCormick's train
> modeling course with each language?  (I think McCormick is still
> teaching?  Can we get him to run that experiment?)
> 

Yess!
Jacob, I like that idea. If we want to learn anything this will be one of the things to do.
Language wars are a very inefficient way of using time, so I have tried to refrain from it. But it seems answers are needed on the matter of Oberon.

So now you guys have put so much (thank you) that I will have to read a bit of compiler code. That is where old man Wirth will have hidden his answers. Since there is and never was meant to be an ISO document. So bear with me please, I need some time.

There are strong similarities between Modula and Ada, they were both designed in the same years: 1977 onward. And both grew from Pascal.
Ada in request to a Dod requirement, and Modula as a teaching language.

Now Ada has grown with the crowd.
Ada95's syntax volume stands at roughly 3000 lexemes on par with C#.
C++ is slightly less at 2500 or so. 

The old man (working in Georg's garage :) found scientific reason to follow the 'reduced instruction set' trend, that was and still is, popular in hardware CPU design. And came up with Oberon, with stands at 700 lexemes.

 (data according to S.Z.Sverdlov "Programming languages and translation methods", Piter Press, 2007)

My suggestion is not: "Ada must be like Oberon." That is childish bull.
And also my question to you is not "what is wrong with Oberon" I know most of that.

My question is "can we learn something, is it worth it to see if Ada could be more compact perhaps. (In my experience it definitely is, but that is speaking from where I stand)
Could the immense brain power of some of the highest paid software engineers be applied to the issue of 'progressive refinement' of what exists in Ada? Could we find scientific reason for a critical look at where Ada in particular (and IT in general) is going?
I mean a few high visibility software projects are again suffering  of "misinformation over the final cost". The JSF comes to mind.

And talking about JSF: is it possible to outbid the C crowd? So we do not see any more of this running to C programmers ("yes, we still have all the Ada methodologies in place, it will not be a problem") (this should be filed under famous last words!)


cheers,

j.
--
"We have to learn how to use our words. It's a fantastic thing--we humans are so easily trapped in our own words. 
The word time, for instance--we run into puzzles about the concept of time and then we say, oh, what a terrible thing. We don't realize we're the source of the puzzles
because we invented the word....
                           John Archibald Wheeler.




> Greetings,
> 
> Jacob
> -- 
> ACRONYM: A Contrived Reduction Of Nomenclature Yielding Mnemonics