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-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7bcba1db9ed24fa7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-07 11:33:13 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn1feed!worldnet.att.net!135.173.83.71!wnfilter1!worldnet-localpost!bgtnsc06-news.ops.worldnet.att.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3B475678.C582735D@worldnet.att.net> From: James Rogers X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: is ada dead? References: <3B460DA9.C2965042@ix.netcom.com> <9ff447f2.0107061757.34ca0723@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2001 18:33:12 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.86.35.186 X-Complaints-To: abuse@worldnet.att.net X-Trace: bgtnsc06-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 994530792 12.86.35.186 (Sat, 07 Jul 2001 18:33:12 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2001 18:33:12 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:9608 Date: 2001-07-07T18:33:12+00:00 List-Id: Adrian Hoe, It is good to hear from an Ada user in Malaysia. It is unfortunate that Malaysian Universities see themselves as sources of training for technology fads. The story you present below tells me that UTM is interested only in encouraging payments from students and industry. It has no real interest in making Malaysia a premier software education and development center. The education I can imagine from UTM can be described using an old phrase American immigrants used to describe the Platte River over 150 years ago: It is a mile wide and an inch deep. Another common description was "Too thick to drink and too thin to plow." The first saying indicates that the river is not nearly as impressive as it may first appear. The second saying indicates that it has no practical use. I am amazed that the senior lecturer was unchallenged in his or her statement about Ada being too old. I expect this is in comparison to Java. This amounts to saying that a proven product is not as good as an unproven product because the unproven product is newer. Such a statement is pure nonesense. It is even more nonesensical when you realize that Java has very few new language developments. It is simply a compilation of a lot of language features from a lot of other languages. In fact, without the standard Java API the language would be completely ignored. It offers nothing new, and it offers all these old features with very poor performance. I would have been tempted to ask the senior lecturer if he or she was willing to fly in an airplane with avionics programmed in Java. Look at Java's thread model. It is seriously flawed. This is not just my opinion. This is the opinion of the Java development team themselves. The earliest Java thread model included methods stop() and suspend(). After several years of use it was discovered that those methods are so unsafe that they had to be deprecated in the language. The use of each method would frequently result in deadlocks and race conditions. The major problem was not that those methods were faulty, but that the thread model was designed such that those methods could not be properly fixed. The only option left to the Java design team was to simply declare those methods to be broken, and advise against their use. Java tried one somewhat new idea for dealing with threads. That is the concept of thread groups. The idea was that threads could be associated with a group, allowing all the threads in a group to be stopped or suspended at the same time. Now that the stop() and suspend() methods are deprecated, there is no reason to use thread groups. Thus, the one attempt at real invention in the Java language was made redundant because the underlying thread model was so poorly designed. Java was originally touted as the answer to client-side programming in a networked environment using applets. Applets are java applications running in a user's browser. For several years people tried to make applets work. Some success was achieved. Then Java 2 was released, with its Java Foundation Classes including the Swing gui components. Swing is supposed to be usable with applets as well as regular applications. Unfortunately, Netscape and Internet Explorer have chosen to ignore Sun's advice on HTML support for Swing applets. Each has chosen its own approach to supporting Swing, resulting in a most horrible nightmare of HTML code to merely start a Swing applet. Even worse, there is no assurance that Netscape and Internet Explorer will not change their own HTML syntax to support Swing. The result is that Swing is essentially unusable in applets. Most companies simply use dynamically created HTML and CGI to perform client-side programming. Microsoft has created Application Server Pages for this purpose. Sun followed up with Java Server Pages. Applets are simply another feature of Java found to be of little practical use. Java is an unstandardized language. Sun likes to call this a de-facto standard. Sun has its own meaning for such a phrase. It means that everyone is encouraged to use Java. The Java API documentation is freely published on the web (even though the API documentation contains some serious errors). Sun is free to change the API documentation at any time. The thread example above is a good example. Sun maintains complete control over what Java is and is not. Sun has started into formal international standardization of Java no less than five times. Each time they have pulled out of the effort. It is not clear to me that Sun will ever cooperate with a standardization of Java. Java is clearly not superior to Ada. Java is not even clearly newer than Ada. Java is clearly more unstable and unsafe to use than Ada. Jim Rogers Colorado Springs, Colorado USA