Unsigned Trash, U. of Ariz.

Unsigned Trash, U. of Ariz.

[Richard.D'Ippolito]

Please, can someone prevent such vulgar & insulting trash as appears above
with subject "Re: USSR Ada" from being posted? If not, can it be removed?

I do not (as a practicing Software Engineer) at the CMU SEI in Pittsburgh
wish to read unsigned insulting trash on what is supposed to be a vehicle
for serious discussion.

Richard S. D'Ippolito, P.E., Ph. D.

Re: Unsigned Trash, U. of Ariz.

[Greg Buzzard]

Personally, I find the "n" key to be a much better alternative than
posting (redundant and uninteresting) complaints about other articles.
Damn glad I have an "n" key so that I can skip over *ALL* forms of
trash, including this one.

Not really unsigned and not trash.

[robert]

N.B.  I mailed this to the original flamer, but it came back
undeliverable.  Not imagining anyone else would be interested
in cluttering up the place with discussing it I felt that mail
would was best.  But since several have responded, I am resending
my reply.  Perhaps we can move this to net.flame or wherever?

To those who flamed about a little lightheartedness mixed in with
what was still a serious comment, could it be that you are hiding
from what you really found offensive in that message.  But I'll
honor your concerns by addressing the things you mentioned first.

- - start of my old mail message
I am that person whose message you found offensive.  There was no
attempt to send anything out unsigned; I had thought the note
was sent out with my signature appended.

Contraceptives prevent conception, whether it is the conception of
human life or the conception of ideas.  With two years of personally
using Ada and seeing a dozen other diligent and intelligent programmers
striving to conceive and then being thwarted in their efforts by the
language, I certainly  stand by the poetic license that I took.

And the word "screw" has no definition in my dictionary relating to
fornication and in the manner it was used, it is a slang term meaning
"I have little concern for what you may be trying to impose on me." 
If I were offended by the mere mention of sex, then you were
the one mentioning it and I should be the one taking umbrage.
What I really find utterly ammusing, is that fornication refers to
sex between UNMARRIED couples; in seeing your reference to the
word, I stop taking you seriously.

What really concerns me is that you might have found my negative
attitude toward the government offensive, ignored that in your
letter, and then found something else to jump at.  If that is
the case, perhaps you may like my help in coming to grips with
your problem?

Note that this is mailed and not in the news, since it seems to
have been something personal with you.


Sincerely,
Robert J. Drabek
- - end of my old mail message

   Since this seems to have gotten bigger than I would have imagined from 
mature and intelligent people, I would like to add a couple more comments.

   First, I am not inexperienced in Ada.  As a member of the
team which has developed one of the largest running projects yet
written in Ada, a product which has broken both the DEC and Data
General compilers over and over, I probably have a better feeling for
the language than most.

   Yes, I even like a lot of features, but little in the
language is revolutionary (uh, oh, I hope the mention of
revolution doesn't offend any radical right wingers); almost every-
thing in the language has been tried or experimented with for the
last thirty years.  I teach a course in "Comparative Programming
Languages" here and allocate portions of the semester trying to
sincerely show the Ada's features and then let them draw their
own conclusions.  While their conclusions are the conclusions of
innocents, they usually feel it is a verbose hodgepodge formed by
a committee who wanted it all but didn't know what all was available.

   Nothing is inherently bad in the language, but as my original
posting argued, with the turnover time to compile and link even
a simple program being exceedingly long, programmers tend not to
test as thoroughly, and more errors are passed through only to
be uncovered when it is too late.

   And since the military is trying to have software written in
this type of environment, and considering that they have the power,
NOT THE RIGHT, to destroy the rest of us through their stupidity,
then I have something to be concerned about and OFFENDED by. 

   Since this is obviously getting off the technical track,  I
would like to draw the discussion to an end.  
  
  If you have more to discuss on the subject, send me a
note personally, and please don't, as someone else here said,
get caught up in this and clutter up the net.

Again, sincerely,

Robert J. Drabek

Re: Not really unsigned and not trash.

[cjl]

>    First, I am not inexperienced in Ada.  As a member of the
> team which has developed one of the largest running projects yet
> written in Ada, a product which has broken both the DEC and Data
> General compilers over and over, I probably have a better feeling for
> the language than most.
> 
> last thirty years.  I teach a course in "Comparative Programming
> Languages" here and allocate portions of the semester trying to
> sincerely show the Ada's features and then let them draw their
> own conclusions.  While their conclusions are the conclusions of
> innocents, they usually feel it is a verbose hodgepodge formed by
> a committee who wanted it all but didn't know what all was available.

  I am currently teaching "Programming Languages" in my school too.
I shared Robert's experience that slow compiler tends to degrade the
software coding. However I don't quite understand why Robert said
that "Ada is a verbose hodgepodge formed by a committee who wanted
it all but didn't know what all was available".  I hope this topic 
can be furtherly explained.

  According to my experience of teaching, the feeling about Ada is
quite different. When students learned Ada, it is just too difficult 
for them to go back to Pascal,C etc. While PL/I is generally
criticized for being a monster created by a committee, Ada is quite
different. Every feature is aimed to support certain software engineering
principle. Without learning software engineering, it is too difficult
to understand Ada. So I just dropped the traditional approach to
teach programming languages by language comparism. Instead, the
class is centering around the topic of software engineering. The
other languages ( such as Modula-2 and C ) is only mentioned and compared 
when they support different approaches to solve the same problem.
So at the end of class, students learned more about software engineering
than the language comparism. But the tradeoff is paid off especially
when students start to feel uncomfortable with other languages
because they learned to design programs in a more structured and 
modularized manner but they find weak support in other languages.
And I think that is a better approach for teaching P.L. in a limited 
amount of time.  (The book I chose is Habermann's "Ada for experienced 
programmers" for senior students with Pascal as their mother tongues.)

  Ada is big. Big and slow compiler has certain effect on the program 
development. If present compilers remain slow or some features are
proved to be too expensive, the definition of Ada Jr. may be
necessary. So it would be beneficial if Robert can tell us why
he thinks  Ada is wrong IN DETAILS according to his experience.
In addition detail and concrete discussion may be less offensive than
quick and general conclusion.

C.J.Lo
Dept. of CIS, IUPUI
UUCP : ...!iuvax!cjl
ARPA : cjl@Indiana@CSNet-Relay