Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

[Bill Meahan <wmeahan@wa8tzg.org>]

Brian Rogoff wrote:

> For better or worse, many programmers will migrate to tools which are
> superficially similar to tools that they already know (witness Java).

Precisely my point! So why aren't PL/SQL programmers migrating to Ada
en' masse? I'm trying to :-)

BTW Besides PL/SQL I've programmed in Fortran (II, IID, IV, IVG, IVH,
66, 77) numerous dialects of Assembler from SPS to 8080 to 32-bit minis,
FOCAL, BASIC (regular and Visual varieties), Perl, C, PIL, SH/KSH, Excel
Macro, Remedy declarations and probably some others I've long since
forgotten. 35+ years of programming is a long time :-)

Right now, for no special reason other than personal enlightenment, and
looking at what PL/SQL might have been if Oracle had left more Ada in
it, I'm learning Ada. I'd like to have my programming staff at work
leverage their PL/SQL knowledge into Ada and build some really robust
applications but TPTB would probably hang me by my thumbs in front of
the iTek building. Seems Ada has a reputatation (around most of the auto
industry, anyway) of being a language for missle programmers and/or
anal-retentive types who spend more time arguing chapter and verse of
ARM or ARM95 than actually coding anything useful. Sorry, but that's the
image TPTB have of Ada. They'd rather throw up crap "Web applications"
quickly than build robust systems. Code quality ain't Job 1. If it were,
our "enterprise architecture" would not be 100% Microsoft, that's for
sure :-(


(For the acronym impaired, TPTB = "The Powers That Be")
-- 
Bill Meahan WA8TZG    wmeahan@wa8tzg.org
Cro-magnon woodworker. Unix Bigot. Perl fan. Oracle weenie.
Managing software development is like herding cats.