Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-201206.rodent.frell.theremailer.net>]

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 since it doesn't
account for things like performance, maintainability, and most of all,
correctness. Considering the development process on any significant piece of
code, which would you rather use, Perl or Ada? Which would you rather
maintain, Perl or Ada? And which would you rather be responsible for?


> > If someone thinks a language is better just because it lets you
> > write programs faster, I'm not sure that person should be called a
> > software engineer.
> 
> 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.

> Depending on the task and language, there will be cases where
> implementation can be quick, without detriment to maintainability.  By
> "quick", I don't mean hasty designless code, but simply choosing the
> right tool for the job.

Fine, but Perl is not something that is readable nor maintainable, and it
should not be used for serious software that is intended to be placed in
service for a long period, nor for an application that is going to need to
grow and adapt. It is fine for quick-and-dirty one-off projects, which is
sort of the opposite of what Ada is about, and it's interpreted so it will
never perform as well as a traditional compiled language.