Re: newbie, Spark 2014 or Ada 2012

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> I would! I'm not at all a fan of SPARK. It solves a problem in a way
> that is only useful for an elite few. I want to solve problems for all
> programmers (at least those that are willing to use Ada!).

You might give Python a try, since unlike Ada you don't need a separate
compiler.  Pylint is not really that important once you understand the
usual errors people make.  Of course the programming philosophy is
totally different.

One thing that's really changed about programming in the past 10 years
or so is that "software engineering" has become kind of a niche area,
like embedded programming.  It used to be that programs were valuable
and cherished, carefully maintained permanent objects.  Today it's more
like: data is gold, code is crap.  Development has gotten so much faster
and easier that tons of code has just one user, or is used just a few
times.  Meanwhile, organizations revolve around amassing data and
sometimes throwing code or computers at it to extract info or
statistics.  But the code is semi-ephemeral.  So long term software
engineering considerations don't apply to it nearly as strongly
as in the traditional Ada/Java/C++ world.