Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Gautier write-only <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com>]

On 21 Apr., 15:35, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> cited:

> "...
> All this feature richness is great, but at some point it runs the risk of
> feature bloat, bogging down resources and performance in the process.
> Remember the Ada programming language? Oft described as having everything
> including the kitchen sink, Ada was ahead of its time with object-
> oriented and other capabilities. But its plethora of features was more
> than most developers could handle, and it never went mainstream. That's
> something the Visual Studio team should keep in mind."

Apparently the notion of bloat evolves with the time.
And a bloat (or something perceived as such) at time t sells bad,
whereas a definite hyper-bloat at time t+n sells well.
Is there any logic in it ? I guess it is largely a question of image,
marketing, "zeitgeist" and other soft factors.
A programmer who would have laughed at Ada's generics, when
reincarnated 20 or 30 years later, will perhaps find it normal to
swallow tons of those huge books which are designed to become obsolete
at the next version of Visual Studio...

There are positive points in this citation: 1) he remembers Ada! 2)
the comment "ahead of its time" is rather complimentary.
One might want to add "was and still is and probably will remain", if
you consider the features, regularly added to .Net languages, which
are borrowed from Ada.
But that is the "zeitgeist" part. For the moment, there is some
success at botoxing languages of the 60's.
______________________________________________________________
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