Re: C is 'better' than Ada because...

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

"Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com> writes:
>You say that it is the language of choice when software failure is
>liable to cause loss of life or a very large lawsuit.  These
>are very worthy attributes.  Given that this is the case, why
>isn't it being used more universally for non-mission critical
>software?

Speaking as someone who has used C for a long time, and is very happy
with Ada (despite feeling that a few aspects, which are already far
better than C, could have been better still), I would say that Ada is
a very usable language for all sorts of things.  It was very easy to
"get my feet wet" with Ada/Ed.  With GNAT (as cheap as gcc...) I am
very happy indeed.

What I *don't* understand is why people are puzzled by the fact that it
is hard to dislodge the first occupant of a niche.  (Not impossible, but
hard.)  Mammals didn't replace dinosaurs until after something else wiped
them out.  The only thing that could ever dislodge me from using MacWrite
on a Macintosh to the detestable Microsoft Word was the fact that the old
copy of MacWrite wouldn't run reliably on the latest system software and
the department wasn't about to buy a new copy for just one user.  Word
may have all sorts of extra features, but I already _knew_ MacWrite, had
a lot of documents in MacWrite format that I didn't want to convert, and
didn't see enough advantage in switching to justify learning a new word
processor _however_ good it might be.  (In fact, I'm not switching to
Weird, I'm switching to LaTeX, which I've already used on CMS, VMS, UNIX,
and DOS ...)

Similarly, I drive a 1975 car.  It still works.  I can't *afford* to
replace it with a new model, even if a new model is better.

Let me offer another example.  Suppose there were a programming language
which is simple, far more expressive and powerful than C, as efficient
as C, with a clean GUI library that has been designed so that programs
will be the *same* on UNIX-X, Windows, and Mac, in which type errors and
storage allocation errors and unintentional file overwriting errors and
so on were impossible, yet remained expressive and comfortable.  And
suppose that the implementation were free.

Do you suppose it would take the world by storm?
Well, _I_ use it, but no, Clean (for that is its name), has _not_ taken
the world by storm, and I don't expect it will.

Conversely, the students I've supervised who've used Microsoft Access
for projects tend to be mildly to *extremely* unhappy with the language
side of it, but that doesn't hurt it in the market, does it?

-- 
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ???
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.