Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I doubt there is any general purpose language applied to relatively 
significant sized projects that is going to be 10 time faster than its 
nearest competitor. If that was a reality, I'd bet everyone developing 
apps would be using it. One might find some fractional improvement from 
just a language - and that's something to talk about - but you're right 
that it would have to be measurable and not just perceptual. One might 
also find that for some narrowly defined problem space one language *is* 
10x faster to develop with, but let's not define the problem so narrowly 
that we get the answer we want rather than reality.

You can never divorce "Language Productivity" from the surrounding task 
and the language environment. Its great to say "Programming in Ada is 
more efficient than programming in Java - all other things being equal". 
One might even be convinced of that by some measured data - SLOCS per 
Fortnight or whatever. But in the real world where we actually have to 
build an end product and sell it, "All Other Things" are NEVER equal. 
Hence, the language with a big library and compatibility with the other 
software it is involved with and the best GUI support and the nicest 
IDE, etc., is always going to win even if it has clunky syntax & 
semantics that mean each SLOC is designed and debugged at a higher cost. 
Write fewer SLOCs and productivity goes up!

MDC


chris wrote:
> 
> Assuming it is true that an Ada programmer is 10 times more productive 
> than a Java programmer, it can only be so assuming *equivalent* tools 
> are available to do the job at hand and equivalent programming skill (no 
> point in a comparison otherwise).  If an Ada programmer can complete the 
> original job in 1/10th the time with the right tools, great!  If otoh 
> they could do it in 1/10th the time if the tools existed but the tools 
> aren't available and you have to spend time creating them what's the 
> productivity gain?  Still 1/10th?



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Marin David Condic
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