Re: Why C++ is successful

["Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr>]

Dave Martin a �crit dans le message <35bebe5f.95187031@netnews.msn.com>...
>I personally haven't learned Ada (83/95) yet, so I hesitate to say
>anything one way or the other about it, though I will admit to being
>influenced by my friends occasionally on the subject.  I know many
>people who hate Ada, and I know there are many others who swear by it.
>
A short comment on this from someone who has been teaching/consulting in Ada
since 1980 (no typo here!)

I too have met people who hated Ada (no need to comment on the other ones
:-). Most of the time, it was either because of 1) problems with compilers
or 2) improper training.

As far as 1) is concerned, people see the language through the compiler. If
the compiler is poor, they have a feeling that the language is poor. The
strange thing is that quite often, they refuse to change compiler, and would
rather change language instead. Fortunately, current compilers are much
better, so we can expect this reason to vanish in the future.

As for 2), "Ada is more than just another programming language". Although it
syntactically looks like an enhanced Pascal, programming in Ada requires a
different state of mind. You don't program a computer, you design an
application, the compiler is in charge of bridging the gap between your high
level description and the machine level. People who were not properly
trained often do not understand this different approach, and get very poor
results, with a feeling that strong typing "gets in the way". As Booch
pointed out: "Give a power drill to a carpenter who has never heard of
electricity, and he'll use it as a hammer. He'll bend a few nails and smash
his fingers, because a power drill make a lousy hammer".

I can tell from experience that *very often*, my students tell me a the end
of the course that the language they have discovered was completely
different from what they had heard about it...
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                  J-P. Rosen (Rosen.Adalog@wanadoo.fr)
      Visit Adalog's web site at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/adalog