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From: Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>
Subject: Re: License to Steal
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Date: 2001-04-24T16:01:19+00:00
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Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> 
> A very interesting thesis project for one of your grad
> students, Richard, would be to study what it is that
> makes a programming language able to grab mindshare
> despite being essentially a hacker's toy like C++,
> TCL, Perl, or Python, to name ones familiar to me,
> while for conceptually adequate other programming
> languages, like Ada, even offering to force them down
> the programmer's throats at gunpoint fails.

This is fairly obvious. Anyone can learn to program. I call such people
"coders". In my experience, only 2% of coders are capable of becoming
software engineers. (I don't mean only 2% have been trained as software
engineers; I mean, no matter how much training and experience they get,
only 2% of coders will become software engineers. This has something to
do with how people's brains are wired; only weirdoes can be software
engineers. Normal people can only be coders.) Ada is a software
engineer's language. Ada's features to support software engineering make
no sense to coders. They just get in the way. On the other hand, in my
experience at least 90% of software engineers who know Ada like Ada; its
features reflect the way they think.

The problem is not languages, it's who we allow to create software.
There's no easy way to determine if someone is a coder or part of that
2%. If we could restrict professional software development to software
engineers, Ada would be much more popular.