Re: newbie, Spark 2014 or Ada 2012

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

"Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:
> "It doesn't matter what you do, the bridge must be finished by the end
> of the month." If the civil engineer goes along with that, ...  All
> bridges need to be correct, robust, and reliable. Schedule and cost
> are secondary.

Would you say the same thing about making a bookshelf?  Lots of people
make bookshelves with home tools and not much planning or engineering.
Cue the jokes about the million dollar bookshelves built by the US
military.  The home tool approach is much quicker and more cost
effective and you get a perfectly usable bookshelf.

To be sure, I'd have doubts about flying in an airplane that was
programmed in Python.  That kind of thing is why I'm interested in Ada.
Blogging software?  Python works perfectly well for that.  Youtube is
programmed in Python, it's spread across 10,000's of computers, and if a
few percent of them are down at any given moment, nobody cares outside
of their own staff.  If there's a serious enough bug report, they can
push out a change within a few hours.  And even if all of Youtube
crashes for part of a day (I don't think this has happened, though Gmail
(written in Java) has had such outages), people might get annoyed but
nobody will die.  They probably won't even remember the incident if it
doesn't recur too often.

In construction terms, there's a spectrum ranging from "bookshelf" to
"suspension bridge" and civil engineering starts becoming important
somewhere in the middle of that scale.  What Python does is expand the
range of the "bookshelf" construction approach to tasks of intermediate
complexity and moderate performance demands.  So lots of programs that
used to take planning and teamwork and multi-week schedules can instead
be banged out by one person in a few afternoons, if they start from a
reasonably clear idea of what they want to do.  I'm sure you can
understand why people value this.  A full-spectrum programmer should be
able to use the techniques best suited to solve the problem that they
actually have.  If your bookshelf proposal requires a 6 month study
before you start driving nails, your approach is not competitive.