Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

After the “bloated language”, “military language” and others funny  
criticisms, here is the “committee language” criticism:

Quoted from a Lua history paper, http://www.lua.org/history.html

     There is an old joke that says that "a camel is a horse
     designed by a committee". Among programming-language people,
     this joke is almost as popular as the legend about programming
     languages designed by committees. This legend is supported by
     languages like Algol 68, PL/I, and Ada, all designed by
     committees, which did not fulfill the expectations of their
     sponsors.

Enjoy a good laugh.

Note: I am not posting this as an easy criticism about Lua in an Ada place  
; and there's no bad intentions from them with this sentence, which starts  
in such way it's clear it should not be taken literally (if all criticisms  
could be as funny as this one…).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Sun, 07 Oct 2012 04:44:57 +0200, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)  
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> a écrit:
> Note: I am not posting this as an easy criticism about Lua in an Ada  
> place ; and there's no bad intentions from them with this sentence,  
> which starts in such way it's clear it should not be taken literally (if  
> all criticisms could be as funny as this one…).

Moreover, this paper is not that bad, and contains a clever remark:

     Everyone that works with programming languages knows how easy
     it is for people to start "religious wars" about the subject.
     An interesting characteristic of those wars is that, usually,
     the more mundane the subject, the hotter the discussion. For
     instance, people get much more excited discussing semicolons
     than discussing higher-order functions.

I agree with this.

However, I don't agree with their later arguments (later after the first  
quote) about “committee languages” and the issues they feel to see with  
designing prior to implementing. As an example, if “not null” was part of  
Ada since the beginning, there would be a cleaner syntax for it, a “not  
null” by default, which would be more close to the model authors surely  
have in mind ; a more complex example would be with interface types and  
tagged types. Things get cleaner when designed the sooner, and before  
implemented.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Sun, 07 Oct 2012 05:19:33 +0200, Dennis Lee Bieber  
<wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> a écrit:
> 	No mention of COBOL and CODASYL? (Or the DBTG and network database
> systems?)
>
> 	In comparison to COBOL, Ada was just designed by a team, not a
> committee -- a committee may have approved the design, but how many
> languages are still the domain of a single person? Even BASIC is
> accredited to Kemeny and Kurtz (sp?).

I'm near to finish reading this paper, and they introduce this issue. They  
acknowledge they have them‑self designed Lua in a kind of committee, but a  
small committee, and the “small” looks important to them. By the way, I'm  
not sure to know what's the exact difference between a team and a  
committee. Obviously, the bigger the committee is, the harder it is to get  
an unanimity (I know it's just smalltalk). Well, there don't seems to be  
that much turnover with Ada's committee, isn't it? Looks good in that  
regard: not too big (thanks to the proposal submission process), not too  
small (all main and serious actors belongs to it), and stable though time  
as far as I know.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

[Simon Wright]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> By the way, I'm not sure to know what's the exact difference between a
> team and a committee.

Off the top of my head, all the members of the team work on the product;
a committee has (a) authority over the technical content of the product,
and (b) members whose only technical role is to review the product.

Not all committees are bad!

Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

[Mart van de Wege]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> After the “bloated language”, “military language” and others funny
> criticisms, here is the “committee language” criticism:
>
> Quoted from a Lua history paper, http://www.lua.org/history.html
>
>     There is an old joke that says that "a camel is a horse
>     designed by a committee". Among programming-language people,
>     this joke is almost as popular as the legend about programming
>     languages designed by committees. This legend is supported by
>     languages like Algol 68, PL/I, and Ada, all designed by
>     committees, which did not fulfill the expectations of their
>     sponsors.
>
> Enjoy a good laugh.

A good laugh indeed. Obviously written by someone who grew up in the PC
era.

I grew up in the 8-bit era, and I dabbled in lots of programming
languages, and I know that even in the early 80s Algol was a
well-respected language; mostly because it inspired Pascal, but my
sources spoke highly of the regard it held as one of the first
Structured Programming languages.

I never read much PL/I critiques that emphasised 'design by
committee'. In fact, the common criticism was more that it tried to
include everything but the kitchen sink.

As for Ada, I still dabble in it (I wrote a few Nagios plugins in it),
and I love it for its elegance. It is certainly, in terms of consistency
and elegance, comparable to one-man designs such as Forth or Python.

Mart

-- 
"We will need a longer wall when the revolution comes."
    --- AJS, quoting an uncertain source.