Re: How to make Ada a dominant language

[Russ <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Maybe "The Borg" - Star Trek TNG?
> 
> In addition, to comment on Russ's comment about closed minds. I don't think
> anybody has any objection to your developing any dialect of Ada you want to
> and seeing if it has anything useful to offer. Others have done the same in
> the past in order to get features into Ada that didn't exist. (I recall
> someone had a version of Ada that included OOP features on top of Ada-83 -
> anybody remember that?) It just won't find much traction here because there
> are lots of good reasons why the syntax is what it is.
> 
> The problem is it will not likely gain much acceptance in the Ada community
> because a) People like the fact that there is One-And-Only-One Ada, b) we
> don't believe there is anything seriously "broke" about the syntax, c) we
> perceive the complaints you have as probably coming from a perspective of
> "This isn't what I'm used to, so I want to change it to look more like what
> I know" rather than being some well founded criticism of the syntax based on
> some kind of evidence of a real problem (Is there a real problem? Can you

No, it's not that I want something I'm "used to." On the contrary, I
want to get RID of something I'm tired of: the semicolons in C/C++.

> point to some kind of evidence that programs are routinely bungled or
> frequently contain syntax errors because of ":=" or ";" being parts of the
> language? Anything beyond "It doesn't look comfortable to me?")  d) the
> syntax of Ada was carefully designed by people with a high level of
> experience and background in language design and the decisions were not made
> lightly, on a whim or because of one individual's "preference" that it look
> a certain way.

It would be interesting to add up all the time programmers spend going
back and putting in semicolons and recompiling after the compiler
catches their omission. I'll bet it's over a tenth of a percent of the
programming time (of C/C++ and Ada programmers). Not much, eh? Let's
see, if 100,000 programmers are using those languages, that's 100
man-years per year flushed right down the toilet.

But the issue is deeper than that. The unnecessary delays and annoyances
disturb a programmers continuity. Why do you think "scripting" languages
are so much better for rapid prototyping? The compile cycle is
eliminated. Eliminating semicolons will not eliminate the compile cycle,
but it will make it much less annoying, thereby making Ada more
convenient for another whole class of applications.

> You should know that there is a *lot* of collective experience in this
> group - especially with developing safety-critical systems. Being critical
> of Ada is O.K., but if you start getting dozens of (expert) opinions here
> about why something is generally a good/bad idea, you might want to give a
> little credit to the sources.

If the Ada community is unwilling to adapt, that is certainly their
perogative. With all due respect, however, I find most of the objections
to my proposal to be unconvincing. On the one hand, most people seem to
be saying that syntax is unimportant, but on the other hand it is
sacrosanct and not to be messed with. Then I get the folks telling me
that simple concepts used in Fortran 95 won't work or will cause some
kind of insidious problem. It's almost as if someone were standing at
the airport and explaining why airplanes can't possibly fly, and even if
they could they would be useless.

>     "Having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as
>     of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
>         --  G.K. Chesterton

I agree. Do you?

Russ