Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be (Ian Ward)]

On June the Fourth, 1996, James Robinson (The Amorphous Mass) wrote
---

> Those of us lone programmers who put speed and space at a premimum
> are willing to go hunting for stray pointers as a necessary cost
> of using a small, fast language.

If I hear the implication that Ada is not fast just one more time
I think I will scream. The whole perpetuation of this myth is carried
by Chinese whispers from feature obsessive people who used complicated
Ada constructs, TEN years ago, (before compiler writes had devised 
efficient implementations.) These people left the Ada scene and have
not looked at it since.

Nine times out of ten it is just as fast as 'C' or assembler or anything
else.

> Besides, Ada is not the only big, safe, feature-laden, industrial-strength 
> language out there.  So obviously there are people who would agree 
> wholeheartedly with your argument, but who would then disagree that Ada 
> would be the best language to use for "professional" programming.  The 
> nature of that disagreement is, of course, subjective.

And then later that day, he said -

>   They're also one of the great dangers of the future.  I keep a fairly 
> substantial library of useful little functions that I've written over the 
> 3 or so years I've been programming in C, and their reusability is greatly 
> enhanced by the fact that I can tweak the code a little for particular 
> applications.  By contrast, at work we're trying to get this souped-up OO 
> development platform to talk to an edits package written in C (the 
> development platform is written in C++) and we keep getting errors 
> concerning classes that we didn't know existed, whose purpose is completely 
> unknown to us and undocumented, apropos problems that no amount of 
> debugging has revealed sofar, because the code and the interface is at 
> such a high level that the programmer only has the most notional control 
> over what's actually happening.  The classes will doubtless get used 
> over and over again, but too much of our development time consists of 
> waiting for support to call back.
>  I'm thus wary of the idea of "code reuse." Not dismissive, just wary.

The first question, James, I must ask is, is C++ your idea of an alternative?
You say that Ada is not the only big, safe, feature laden, industrial-
strength language, (mischien) but then go on to give actual real
evidence as why C++ isn't. All your arguments against Ada are based on
inaccurate hearsay, and all of your arguments against C++ are based on your
own actual experience. Why are you arguing against Ada, if I was in your
shoes, I should be saying that C++ is crap, and trying to use something
that prevents the errors that everybody there seems to be experiencing.
C++ is not crap at all of course, I am still learning it, but it simply
is trying to evolve into a language which is fundamentally different
in concept to its parent. A lot more than one generation of evolution
will be need for such a radical change in language aim.

Software reuse is not the problem, and neither is Object oriented
design. In this case of yours, it appears that it is a bad implementation
of C++ that seems to be behind it. Of course, at this point we can go
into how it came to be a bad implementation.

I am not going to though, I will simply say that if I were to end up
using software, where in the background, side effects of it were
detrimentally affecting mine, that I could not even find, then I WOULD
use something else. Bruce Lee said, "If it works, use it." It clearly
is not working. Anything else must be better? Why are you not trying
to convince your boss to use something else? Anything else?


Best regards, hope it is as hot there as it is here,
Ian Ward's opinions only : ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be
It's "burgled" Mr. President, not burglarised.