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=1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, LOTS_OF_MONEY,MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5f8432149982f35e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: fca1b,5f8432149982f35e X-Google-Attributes: gidfca1b,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Ada and QNX Date: 2000/09/30 Message-ID: <8r5pe5$h70$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 676000394 References: <8r1i82$ri3$1@kujawiak.man.lodz.pl> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x58.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Sat Sep 30 22:28:25 2000 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.os.qnx X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 2000-09-30T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , "James Boucher" wrote: > I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer > from the old school... I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD. > DEAD. Well I won't comment specifically on this piece of nonsense, but I do have a general comment, applicable to Ada folks as well, that it is remarkable how people are ready to assume that a technology is dead just because they don't use it any more. All the time I meet people o who think Pascal is not used for serious industrial projects any more (or perhaps never was). o who think that OS/2 is no longer in use o who think that PL/1 is no longer in use You even find more ludicrous examples, such as people who think that COBOL is no longer in use. When our department at NYU sat down to discuss the PL to use in the first year course a couple of years ago, I was quite appalled to hear a professor say that he thought one of the reasons that we should stop teaching Pascal was that it was not used commercially. I asked him how he knew, and without hesitation, he said "well I never encountered it" -- this was someone with minimal experience with *ANY* real world software. It is particularly ironic to make this statement in New York City, where the Metropolitan Transport Authority has till recently used primarily Pascal for many technical functions (I say till recently, since the most recent new contract has switched to the Matra code which is in Ada). During this same conversation, the argument trotted out in favor of Java was that it was widely used in industry. Again, no one actually knew this to be the case (and indeed examples of successful large scale use of Java are actually few and far between). But they thought it was, so that was good enough. Of course an honest reaction to the bogus argument that one should teach a widely used language would be that the only reasonable choices are Visual Basic or COBOL, but I can promise that virtually all the faculty members around that or any similar table in the US are (a) quite ignorant about these two languages and (b) quite sure they want to stay ignorant :-) Robert Dewar Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.