Re: Air traffic control system in Java

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

On 3/3/2011 5:50 PM, Rick wrote:
> Simply, Ada does not (as a standard language)
> provide for construction of a Graphical User Interface.  Students (and
> commercial software houses), in my experience, insist that it is no
> use if you cannot draw pretty pictures with it.

Again, this nonsense. This is far worse than when I, as the
stereotypical stupid C++ advocate, say "subtypes, big deal,
I can code that up as a class".

Graphical user interfaces are how *all* computer programs now
communicate and interact with their users. If it is painful to
construct a GUI in some programming system then programmers are
correct to reject that system, because building programs with
GUIs is their job, and why would they want to make their lives
difficult?

In fact, for systems like air traffic control, the graphical user
interface is one of the most vital parts of the system, because it
must communicate to its users an accurate and easy to grasp picture
of the state of the traffic.

Calling the ability to build user interfaces "drawing pretty pictures"
so desperately misses the point that it's tragic.