Re: Straight Jackets

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> Oh, I think most of us would accept that Ada has superior safety features
> and that this is important. I think Stanley Allen drew the analogy to a
> Volvo in an article on AdaPower. He also observed that Volvo had to add some
> "Sex Appeal" features because people weren't buying it in droves.
> 
> I'm not saying that lack of safety is a sex appeal feature. I'll bet that
> Volvos may have gotten sexier but that underneath it all there is still a
> lot of safety engineering.

I think the real reason has to do with "design effort". If you are accustomed
to C/C++/Java/Assembly language, where you can express "what you like" (or
"almost" in some cases), then you will find Ada/Ada95 a restrictive
"straight jacket". To love Ada, you need to learn how to go about
things in a different (safer) way, and this requires _effort_, and only
then starts to feel less like a "straight jacket".

For an example, the C++ programmer can easily share file descriptors 
(or FILE pointers) in and out of a thread (task), or between threads,
if he thinks this is safe to do so. In Ada, the File_Type cannot be 
copied (like any limited type), and so you can only pass the
File_Type to the rendevous; but this use cannot be extended past the 
rendevous in the task (with good reason).

This makes perfect safety sense but programmers new to this straight
jacket, often refuse to like it.  Other examples involving access
type scope etc. can also be made -- in each case, the programmer 
new to Ada feels that this is cramping his style. So rather than
put the effort to go beyond learning the language, and learning to
apply it, they fall back to their old evil ways and tools.

Soooo,

The real difficulty, IMHO, is getting programmers to accept that these
programming "straight jackets" are a "good thing" (TM). ;-)

Warren.

> I think I'd suggest that the fundamentals of Ada are very superior to the
> fundamentals of most other general purpose languages. I'd even suggest that
> it had a lot of features that other languages don't have. (Tasking &
> generics come to mind - analogous to a Borg Warner T-56 six speed racing
> transmission and an Edelbrock Nitrous Oxide System) Those are all wonderful
> language attributes, but somewhere along the line the buyer seems to want
> plush velour seats, a hood scoop, wheel flares and a spoiler and doesn't
> want them to look like someone installed them with a pop-rivet gun and
> sprayed Rustoleum on it. The parallel with Ada would be all of the
> dingleberries hanging around other languages in the way of development
> tools. They've got them and we don't - at least not in the spiffy package
> that the buyer has come to expect.
> 
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> 
> "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com> wrote in message
> news:3B619A6D.5DD6E782@home.com...
> > I'd like to offer a slightly different "analogy" :
> >
> > _flamesuit on_
> >
> > The shopper looks at the Ada car, and notices that it has seatbelts and
> > of course 4 doors on it. The programmer says, but I don't want to be
> > restrained from accessing the outdoors -- I go through drive-throughs
> > a lot..
> >
> > The shopper than goes down the street and settles on the C++ car
> > which does not have the restrictive seat belts, and of course,
> > _NO_ doors to get in the way ;-)  The Java car has seatbelts, but
> > no doors...
> >
> > _flamesuit off_

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg