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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,42b96374c851ce5a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) Subject: Re: Ada for numerics computation (i.e. forget Fortran ?) Date: 1999/04/26 Message-ID: <7g1qcm$o4$2@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 471037798 References: <372083A1.45A5EB97@t-online.de> <7fqeua$ih8$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk> <8790bhslfz.fsf@bglbv.my-dejanews.com> <7fvbth$4m4$1@news.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <7fvpl8$mpm@drn.newsguy.com> <7g1e20$t12$1@wanadoo.fr> <7g1n08$8t8$1@news.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-04-26T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Edwin Guenthner 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: