From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,971aa11c293c3db1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-22 07:31:57 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-04!supernews.com!cabal10.airnews.net!news.airnews.net!cabal1.airnews.net!news-f.iadfw.net!usenet From: "John R. Strohm" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada The Best Language? Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 09:18:06 -0500 Organization: Airnews.net! at Internet America Message-ID: <7E9CC98C0715E092.A91B89D11C0D9738.014E27B4F97A2D54@lp.airnews.net> X-Orig-Message-ID: <9jeo1t$jrv@library2.airnews.net> References: <5be89e2f.0107170838.c71ad61@posting.google.com> <9j1uio$8br$1@nh.pace.co.uk> <5be89e2f.0107171810.1cee29c0@posting.google.com> <9j46bt$3qj$1@nh.pace.co.uk> <5be89e2f.0107181237.4ab3594@posting.google.com> <5be89e2f.0107191355.534211d0@posting.google.com> Abuse-Reports-To: abuse at airmail.net to report improper postings NNTP-Proxy-Relay: library2.airnews.net NNTP-Posting-Time: Sun Jul 22 09:30:21 2001 NNTP-Posting-Host: !`+:k1k-Y>Ns9:, (Encoded at Airnews!) X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10417 Date: 2001-07-22T09:18:06-05:00 List-Id: Marin David Condic answered you, but you apparently didn't completely understand his answer. Taking "developer productivity" as your metric of interest basically destroys the ability to conduct a meaningful language comparison. If you go back far enough, to studies that may well have been conducted before you were born, you will find the interesting result that programmers, on average, produce, over the life of a development project, ten lines of code per day, and (here is the interesting part) that number is INDEPENDENT of the language used. This discovery went a long way to push the move from assembly language to higher-order languages in the 1960s. When you take "developer productivity" as your metric, you basically ignore lifecycle costs. Ada was designed to minimize lifecycle costs, at the POTENTIAL risk of slightly higher initial development costs. That risk did not really materialize: development costs using Ada are typically not significantly higher than development costs using C++. Where Ada shines, as Condic observes, is that the total lifecycle costs, the ongoing support costs, the bugfinding and fixing costs in the out years, are MUCH lower than with C/C++. This is an issue that some commercial software companies fundamentally choose to ignore: once the product is sold to the end loser, it isn't their problem any more, as long as the buglist is not so egregious as to turn the loser off forever. (Even then, if the company enjoys an effective monopoly on that product, it doesn't matter HOW bad the buglist is: the loser is stuck.) With military embedded systems, on the other hand, this isn't true. The company doesn't just do the initial development. They also do the out-year support and upgrade. That system may well have a life exceeding 30 years, and those software systems will still be needed. The B-52 first flew in the 1950s, as I recall, and is still the mainstay of the fleet. The F-16, the first truly software-intensive bird, first flew in the late 1970s, and is still on the front lines 20+ years later. For systems like that, initial development costs, which you are measuring under "developer productivity", vanish when compared to total lifecycle costs, which you are by definition not measuring. C++ (and C, for that matter) take the viewpoint of "trust the programmer" and allow the programmer to do whatever he wants, EVERY TIME, on the assumption that once in a while the programmer needs to do something weird. Ada aims at reducing bug generation and propagation, by attempting to catch the bugs that are easy to commit and sometimes hard to track down. Ada allows the programmer to do whatever he wants, if he wants it bad enough, but MAKES him go through some contortions if he is apparently doing something that historically is known to cause problems. These contortions both force the programmer to think about it, and, much more importantly in Ada's philosophy, warn the maintenance programmer TEN YEARS LATER that there is heavy-duty black magic lurking in those contorted, tortured lines of code. (I've done low-level device drivers in Ada, including machine code insertions as defined in the LRM. I know what kind of contortions I had to pull to do them. They forced me to think CAREFULLY about the problem and how to solve it.) codesavvy wrote in message news:5be89e2f.0107191355.534211d0@posting.google.com... > I can't believe some of the posters in this thread. Again I said that > Ada 95 has nothing to offer that is substantially better than C++. If > there was then logically higher productivity would result. I can't > believe that you have a difficult time grasping this concept. Some > posters have been kind enough to provide me with anecdotal data and in > one case a link to some data that Capers Jones has which I appreciate. > > Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) wrote in message news:... > > In article <5be89e2f.0107181237.4ab3594@posting.google.com>, codesavvy@aol.com (codesavvy) writes: > > > "Marin David Condic" wrote in message news:<9j46bt$3qj$1@nh.pace.co.uk>... > > >> Well, if Ada has nothing to offer and this is obvious then why are you > > >> bothering to a) read this newsgroup and b) post to it at all? > > >> > > > > > > Here is what I wrote: > > > > > > I think the answer is rather obvious, Ada has nothing to offer that is > > > substantially better than what C++ offers. > > > > > > I didn't say that Ada had nothing to offer, just nothing that is > > > substantially better than C++. > > > > > >> If you have a serious question about Ada and its potential benefits and are > > >> willing to entertain the possibility that maybe Ada *is* a better choice > > >> than C++, then we will be more than happy to point to resources for you or > > >> help you learn the language or answer questions about the language. But a > > >> blanket statement that seems to be saying "Ada is s**t! Why are you guys > > >> bothering???" seems more calculated to start a flame war than to get a > > >> serious question answered. > > >> > > > > > > You must have missed my other post where I stated that Ada 95 is an > > > excellent language and may actually be better than C++. However, I > > > don't feel that developer productivity is significantly enhanced with > > > Ada 95 as opposed to C++. > > > > You started with "nothing to offer", but seem to have devolved into > > "no productivity advantage to offer". The reason I use Ada is not > > productivity, but correctness.