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From: "Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>
Subject: Ada requires too much typing!
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 08:57:09 -0400
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Date: 2010-05-26T08:57:09-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

This is just an observation on the difference between two communities.

I've been recently using Scala for a project (I'd rather use Ada, but it's
hard for me to justify the cost of converting... alas). Scala is a
functional/OO hybrid language that targets the JVM. It prides itself on,
among other things, its concise syntax. Not surprisingly the Scala community,
as evidenced by the posts on a Scala newsgroup, regard conciseness as an
important feature for a programming language. I agree that conciseness can in
some cases improve readability. However, I also believe that it can obscure a
lot of important detail and make it hard to understand the execution cost of
the code. Perhaps because of my experience with Ada, or perhaps because of my
basic personality, I'm not necessarily a fan of extreme conciseness.

However, the argument that I see some people putting forth on the Scala group
is that conciseness is good because it saves typing. I really can't
understand that. How hard is it to type?

One of the people on that group posted this comment related to the fact that
Java requires public/private access specifiers on methods whereas Scala uses
public by default. Thus in the "common" case of a public method you don't
have to type the word 'public'...

<quote>
The whole "I will make you do extra work coding just so you can demonstrate
to me that you're not being lazy" attitude of Java is perhaps useful in some
situations, but we already have Java for that.  I don't think adopting that
attitude of making you do busywork would be an asset for Scala.

  --Rex
</quote>

Hmmm... "busywork"... interesting. I can only imagine what this person, or
others in that community, would have to say about Ada... or SPARK!

Peter