Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice

[Ralph Paul <repaul@ibm.net>]

Joerg Rodemann wrote:

> I didn't know there are already Fortran 95 Compilers...has that standard
> been defined in the meanwhile?

To be honest I don't know either if it has become a standard. I just
continued
what Robert Dewar started (;-).

 
> > C++,... , is the need to teach people to apply software engineering
> > skills.
> > Learning Ada seems to help in that respect (:-).
> 
> Agreed: my experience during my studies was that students are introduced to
> those old-fashioned hacking languages like Fortran and C. Although Fortran
> may be quite suitable for smaller numerics or when you want to use existing
> libraries. But you need months to remove the students habits they gained with
> these languages. I believe the use of a strongly typed language with
> facilities for modularization would support the students to develop a sense
> for simple and maintainable solutions. Ada might be a proper beginner's
> language (although it is a big language, at the beginning the teacher should
> be able to restrict the needed knowledge.) as well as Modula-2/3 or Oberon.
> Java seems not very good to me for a beginners puproses because it leeds
> to inlinining of everything if they switch to C or C++. I like separation
> of spec and body pretty much.
> 

I agree with you absolutly. The problem at my company is that we are
under
such tremendous time pressure ( and political pressure too -- see
Spiegel article)
that I would not even get a chance to request reimplementing existing
software in
Ada95. Also aerospace engineers tend to be really conservative when it
comes
to their favorite tool (Fortran). 

It's just very strange that engineers are trained a long time in
applying
engineering methods to find solutions to new problems but when it comes
to
solving software problems there is almost no training. Most of the time
it's
more or less chaotic. Therefore I love Ada becaus along with learning a
new
language you learn a little bit about software engineering. Even if you
use
Fortran afterwards. Learning Ada can sort of open your eyes.

( Hope you understand my gospel (;-))


Later,

Ralph Paul