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From: Mart van de Wege <mvdwege@mail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2012 06:21:55 +0200
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Date: 2012-10-08T06:21:55+02:00
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"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.