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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,73036d0217be91e2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Bertrand Meyer Subject: Re: Inheritance versus Generics Date: 1997/04/28 Message-ID: <336596D9.2781E494@eiffel.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 238853704 References: <33601924.774@flash.net> <3360CA7A.2272@elca-matrix.ch> Organization: Interactive Software Engineering Inc. Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-04-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote (apropos my book "Object-Oriented Software Construction", second edition, Prentice Hall, and some of its critical comments about Ada 95): > Well the world of language advocacy has always been one in which people > are very ready to criticize without much practical experience. A good rule > would be that you should not criticize a language unless you have written > substantial amounts of real delivered production code in that language. A bit facile perhaps. Prove that my comments about Ada 95 are wrong, if they are; or, barring such a proof, state where and why you disagree; but discuss my arguments, not the number of lines of Ada 95 you assume I have compiled. Large-scale practical experience with a language cannot hurt, of course, but (posited) lack thereof does not disqualify one from talking about the language. If we took Prof. Dewar's advice literally, there would be (among other extreme consequences) no room for broad-ranging programming language surveys, since no one can be a seasoned programmer in all of - say - Ada, Eiffel, Lisp, Tcl, Visual Basic, Fortran 90, Snobol etc. Or, to continue the reductio ad absurdum, one of the justly praised aspects of the original Ada design was that it was heavily critiqued before it was finalized Applying the Dewar principle would have meant that none of that criticism was meaningful, since none of the critics had any extensive practice in the languages being discussed (especially those that were rejected, so that no one ever wrote any "substantial amount of real delivered product code" in them!). "You can't criticize Y because you have not written at least x lines of working Y code" is not a valid dismissal. If you want to debate someone's conclusions, you have to do it on the merits or demerits of his stated case. Otherwise we would fall into ad hominem disputes - and, as we all know, this is not permitted to happen on Usenet. Thanks, by the way, for the nice comments about the book. -- Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc., Santa Barbara (California) 805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, Web page: http://www.eiffel.com OOSC-2 book info: http://www.eiffel.com/doc/oosc.html