From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: newbie, Spark 2014 or Ada 2012 Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2015 15:37:23 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: <87oajl6jq4.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> References: <974c8db0-c9e8-49d4-8db1-3417ec49217b@googlegroups.com> <87k2uenkcw.fsf@nightsong.com> <87615x9s3o.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> <87pp438tm6.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> <87d2028dfy.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> <878uap8539.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> <87zj356p2q.fsf@jester.gateway.sonic.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="22184b02e80198190244f5a2dd813f11"; logging-data="18716"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+Mc64YZWIGWCSglU0J8/U5" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:cZ3lpFyNuBcTsmRbvpRFEtwjrHM= sha1:RUY/GWVOn90viBTgd6DdHviSO8I= Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:26728 Date: 2015-07-09T15:37:23-07:00 List-Id: "Jeffrey R. Carter" 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.