Re: Ada for numerics computation (i.e. forget Fortran ?)

[mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)]

Edwin Guenthner <s_guenth@studsun1.informatik.uni-karlsruhe.de> writes:
|> And there is really a lot of stuff at www.javagrande.org. 
|> People know about all those problems ... and hope that SUN will
|> take care of some of them.

Why would one want to wait until the problems that Java has with
number-crunching applications are fixed in the year 2010 (which
would turn it de-facto in a completely new language, just as the
smartcard subsetting has done), if Ada95 is already a suitable
and excellently supported platform available today?

Every language has applications that it is particularly suited for.
In the case of Java, the paramount design goal was portability-over-
everything. There sure is some market for that, and it sure is not
number crunching. In numerical applications, you are interested
in speed-over-everything plus some assurance over how
your numeric types behave. I don't see, why the number
crunching community should get excited about a super-portable
byte-code interpreter language with a sophisticated GUI API.
A language designed for programming GUIs in set-top boxes
and Web browsers couldn't be further away from what you want to run
your finite-element code on. I do see a number of reasons however,
for why the number crunching community should get interested in
Ada95 as an alternative to Fortran90 and Fortran95.

The childish hype surrounding "Javajavajava" is what has most of all
turned me a bit against this language. Java is praised by too many
people for applications completely outside its legitimate field,
including smartcards, embedded computing, number crunching, image
processing, AI, systems programming, etc. Java is well on the way
of turning from a programming environment into a religion, and for
me at least, this means that healthy scepticism is adviseable. The
Ada community also has an excellent language, but treats it pragmatically
and with more maturity.

Next we hear that Python is the number-crunching language of the
future ... 8-)

Markus
(who participated in his first programming language
flame war at the age of 12 and still enjoys it)

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>