Re: rant (Re: Ada featured in Doctor Dobb's Journal )

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

jhc0033@gmail.com writes:
> Right now, the article basically says: "Fortran had some cool features
> C didn't have, but C had some features Fortran didn't have, and we
> switched to C. But this guy uses Ada, because as we saw before, using
> different languages is OK, and the safety community uses it. He solved
> some discrete math problem he was trying to solve. He could have
> solved it just as easily in any other language perhaps, but would we
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> write an article about it? The end".

The whole point of the article is the "just as easily" bit.  The
author says that he solved his problem *more easily* in Ada than he
could have in C or Fortran, despite his extensive experience (11 years
as a professional) in C and little exposure (6 months as a hobbyist)
to Ada.

> Right now, I'm evaluating Ada as a language to learn and do my next
> project in. I already know more diverse non-mainstream languages
> than most people, so I'm not exactly closed-minded. But this article
> hasn't convinced me of anything.

I commend you for your open-mindedness and your sound process of
evaluating before deciding.  Few people indeed have enough common
sense to do that.  The article does not speak about C++.  If what you
want is a comparison of C++ versus Ada, look elsewhere, like
e.g. http://archive.adaic.com/docs/present/engle/comments/

> A few days ago, I looked at Eiffel, and I'm now convinced that I
> wouldn't like it. Eiffel targets a largely similar audience of
> "correctness-oriented" programmers that Ada does. However, it took
> some digging around (no introductions to the language mention it) to
> discover that Eiffel has a gap in its type system. Guess what, type
> theory is a branch of math, and OOP is a spiritual following. I know
> what takes precedence in my book. The Eiffel community's attitude is
> basically: "we'll just pretend 2+2=5 because we can use it to
> justify some teachings".

I evaluated Eiffel too when I read Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented
Software Construction book.  The two things I dislike the most about
Eiffel are the lack of range constraints on numeric types and the fact
that almost all contract checks are deferred to run-time.  I strongly
prefer compile-time checks over run-time checks, and a language with
no checks at all quickly disappears from my radar.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.