Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

["Richard Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net>]

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:YaWdncfnQoOFHrXd4p2dnA@comcast.com...
> Richard Riehle wrote:
>
> > Language advocacy can be an entertaining activity on a cold winter's
> > evening, but even the most ardent enthusiasts for one language or
another
> > will eventually admit that languages are nothing more than tools for
> > composing computer programs.   The good craftsperson selects the
> > appropriate tool for the job at hand.
>
> Not really.  Programming languages are also tools for thinking.  And
> different languages favor different ways of thinking.  This effect can
> also be seen in spoken languages you can't understand the French and the
> people of Quebec unless you can think in French.  (I am the first to
> admit I can't.  I can try, but I find the exercise very strenuous.  I
> need to literally accept a foreign viewpoint to do it well and I am
> unwilling to do so.  The cultural baggage with Arabic and Chinese is
> larger that that which comes with French, but it isn't as imperialistic.
>
> Japanese on the other hand, is much more demanding than French,  but in
> another sense it is not as hard.  Japanese requires you to act in
> certain ways, but it doesn't try as hard to impose its worldview on you.
>   However, the worldview that comes with Japanese is pretty nasty.
> Note, this does not say that Japanese are nasty. However, I have found
> that there is a huge difference in world view between those Japanese who
> speak English and those who don't, I don't know if this holds true for
> those who speak only another Asian as opposed to European language.  I
> haven't studied Russian in decades, but I remember it as being like the
> Germanic langauges.  They do fit your discription above.  They are tools
> and can be used in many different ways.

When I am in China, the tool for communication I prefer is Chinese, although
I often find myself having to think first in English.   In Japan, I prefer
to use
Japanese as much as possible.   In Russia, I have found it useful to use
Russian, and that does come rather easily to me.   English has become the
reasoning and communication tool for most of the educated world, and
anyone who tries to publish a paper in some other language finds the range
of publications quite limited.

Quite right, that programming languages are tools for reasoning.   If one of
those languages leads one to faulty reasoning, it is the wrong tool.   And
reasoning is largely about choosing the right abstractions.   Sometimes
those
abstractions are internally inconsistent or not easily verifiable.

When comparing C++ and Ada, one of the key issues for me is predictability.
The more I am forced to use C++, the more I realize that it is not now nor
will
it ever be as  consistently predictable as Ada.   I dislike it when a
program
compiles with no errors only to discover something that the compiler should
have
caught.  And the ridicule, "You should have known about that little quirk
in the language,"  does not bring much satisfaction when I realize that such
quirks
are rare in Ada.

Why is it that, in engineering, which is intolerant of surprise, we continue
to use
tools in software engineering that are characterized by their tendency to
produce
surprises?

Richard Riehle