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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham 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 10.204.143.145 with SMTP id v17mr468477bku.7.1339702491032; Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:34:51 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Path: e27ni48423bkw.0!nntp.google.com!news1.google.com!news4.google.com!feeder2.cambriumusenet.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!194.134.4.91.MISMATCH!news2.euro.net!news.mixmin.net!news2.arglkargh.de!news.theremailer.net!frell.theremailer.net!anonymous From: Fritz Wuehler Comments: This message did not originate from the Sender address above. It was remailed automatically by anonymizing remailer software. Please report problems or inappropriate use to the remailer administrator at . Identifying the real sender is technically impossible. Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development References: Message-ID: <28fb3117d9b184797cf3381d0240b765@msgid.frell.theremailer.net> Precedence: anon Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 17:28:32 +0200 Mail-To-News-Contact: abuse@frell.theremailer.net Organization: Frell Anonymous Remailer Date: 2012-06-12T17:28:32+02:00 List-Id: 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 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.