Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

[Chris Humphries <chris@unixfu.net>]

Not to make this a flame war, but it seems that you have never
been in a professional software engineering environment that
involved work on your part other than grunt code writing. Even
someone that has been doing grunt code work for a long project
would understand what I am saying.

Hopefully it is was just communication errors on my part. :)


Keith H Duggar wrote:
>>That is not completely fair. It depends on the programmer as well.
>>Having good documentation (including comments) as well as defined
>>coding standards should make the code readable in any language,
> 
> 
> Any language? No amount of commenting will make Brain F*** or
> Whitespace readable. That is, the comments may be readable,
> the code will not be. And that is an important distinction,
> we are discussing (I think) the readability of CODE not the
> readability of comments.
> 

If Ada is about Software Engineering, then software documents and
software code go hand in hand. Something that a college student
probably has not experienced or learned yet.

> 
>>perl, python. Understanding the syntax of the language helps in
>>both cases. If I know the syntax, and language, I can read any
>>language the same.
> 
> 
> Again as counter examples take BF and Whitespace. These are
> of course extreme examples but the valid point is that language
> absolutely affects readability.
> 

Well, lets exclude those languages as I, for one, do not know of
any real production use of them or anyone that actually uses them
outside of fun and tinkering. I was talking about languages you
come across in reality, such as Perl, Python, C, C++.

I understand the point of readability, but you should understand
that any good software engineering process should include documentation,
use cases, and other things that are related to the software and
is not actual software code. The coding part is generally the easy
part if the documentation and design are done properly.

> 
>>True that python by nature is easy to read, but it is unfair pit
>>it against some perl code itself. I have seen python code that is
>>hard to understand at a glance and perl code that is easy to understand
>>at a glance :)
> 
> 
> I think understandability and readability are really quite
> different. For example, I am able to read the following
> English snip from your post
> 
> 
>>All things being equal, Ada is nice to have, yet Perl is no better off
>>than Python in many respects, unless you talk about OO features and
>>such. Perl 6 should be interesting (even though it may be vaporware for
>>a few more years, heh).
> 
> 
> but I do not understand it all. In other words, I find
> English highly readable yet many English "programs" such as
> the one above make no sense to me whatever.
> 
> 
>>Only reason I could see why the argument of reading the language of
>>Python over Perl would be better is if there was no documentation and
>>you had no idea how it worked before opening up your editors and
> 
> 
> For me, an ideally readable language would be as self-documenting
> as possible. Comments should just be gravy, summaries, or
> notices of something tricky or difficult to understand (not read).
> 
> 
>>Sure language syntax for readability is very nice to have, but it should
>>not negate the need for proper documentation and standards :)
> 
> 
> Hmm, it seems you are now contradicting your general
> sentiment and your earlier specific statement that
> 

The point was, which you totally missed, is that software design
and other documentation define what the program is, how it works,
breakdown flow and define in/outs, and other things. The code
should just be an implementation or "reality" of the documentation.

When I say "documentation", I mean documentation that exists outside
the code itself.

> 
>>coding standards should make the code readable in any language,
> 
> 
> Do you or do you not believe that syntax affects readability?

Of course I do, and thankful for it. When I say coding standards,
I mean a predefined way of how code is to look, naming conventions,
comments (and how they are to be, ie name, params descriptions, etc)
and is a strict structure that is done.

Many languages try to take care of this step for you, because honestly
we do not live in a perfect world, and many companies/firms do not have
this in place, so languages like Ada and Python help in this, as
many [style] syntax structure is defined as part of the language syntax
itself.

The readability of the code seems more important relative to the lack
of documentation.