Re: 30 Years

[gloin.cis.udel.edu!carroll@louie.udel.edu (Mark C. Carroll)]

In article <1993Sep10.114905.6908@sei.cmu.edu> progers@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Pat Ro
gers) writes:
>In article <9309081721.AA18798@manta.nosc.mil> mshapiro@manta.nosc.mil (Michae
l D Shapiro) writes:
>>
>  [reasonable stuff to this point]
>
>>I believe Ada's acceptance problem is that it requires a high level of
>>formality all the time.  It assumes every program must be written in
>>maintainable style.  People become uncomfortable when they must work at
>>that level of formality all the time.  So they reject Ada, even though
>>they probably should use it some of the time.
>>
>
>  I followed your discussion until this point.  What is it that
>_requires_ this style?  One can write a program in Ada in as "informal"
>a manner as desired.  One need not use encapsulation, abstraction, 
>even strong typing in Ada.  (Once you're good at it, it doesn't take much
>more time, though.)  I beleve people reject Ada out of ignorance and
>half-truths, not for technical reasons.

I agree with you partially. I don't think that the formality of Ada is
a problem at all: there are numerous people out there using Pascal,
Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon, Turbo-Pascal, Eiffel, Sather, etc., which
have the same level of formality as Ada.

And part of the problem with Ada *is* ignorance and bigotry. Ada's
gotten a whole lot of bad press, most of which it doesn't deserve.

But another part of the problem is the fault of Ada. I think that the
biggest problem hurting Ada is its perceived size.  Ada is a very
large language. And the way that its reference manual is written makes
it seem even larger.

I got interested in Ada recently, because I considered using it for a
research project involving extending object-oriented languages with
data parallelism. I rejected Ada because of its size. It's a terrific
language in a lot of ways, but it's got so many features, which
interact in so many ways, that to keep track of it all is difficult.

This is made even worse by the way in which Ada documents describe the
language. I got the annotated reference manual for Ada9x, and went to
print it out. How long could it possibly be? I use languages similar
to Ada all the time, and the manuals are between 30 and 100 pages
long. The Ada manual is over *500* pages, the overwhelming majority of
which is bureaucratic twaddle. 

It was certainly enough to drive *me* away. I'd like to use Ada. But
when it comes down to writing an implementation, and I need to know
every detail of what's interacting with my extensions, I can't afford
to search through an overblown, oververbose, overly bureaucratic
manual, hoping that I don't miss anything.

I'm still looking forward to having GNAT. I'd like to be able to
program in Ada, and I expect I'll use it a lot, once I have access to
a decent compiler. But I won't use it for my research.

Too many Ada haters try to say that it's a lousy language, and that
everything about it stinks. But too many Ada lovers refuse to
acknowledge the problems in the language and its presentation, and try
to blame everything on the Ada haters.

	<MC>
-- 
|| Mark Craig Carroll: <MC>     ||"Don't ever think that you can't
|| CIS Grad, Univ of Delaware   ||    change the past
|| PGP key available            ||       or the future"
|| finger carroll@udel.edu      ||  - _Love_and_Anger_, Kate Bush