Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada??

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I've seen similar things. ;-)

But ultimately, you're not going to get much better understanding of how 
to use Ada unless Ada gets used more generally. People who get dumped 
onto a project done in Ada and then return back to other activities 
(because Ada is not used extensively, making it a possible career) don't 
spend enough time there to get good at it & really understand the 
language. They don't necessarily operate in an environment where there 
is long-term institutional knowledge built up around what is the best 
way to do things.

If Ada got out of its position as being a niche-language and got, say, 
20% of the software development market? - there would be a lot more 
widespread knowledge of "Best Practices" and you wouldn't see as much 
incorrect featrue usage.

But that means Ada has to show up in product development and that means 
that people who think Ada is a good thing have to apply it in developing 
new & successful products. That takes entrepeneurs. More of us have to 
do that.

MDC


Marc A. Criley wrote:

> 
> Unfortunately I've found this to be all too true :-(  I've been involved 
> with fixing up more than one system (long after the original designers 
> have moved on) that had horrendous misuse of tasking.
> 
> One had tasks handling the buffering of data in and out of sockets.  A 
> reasonable application of tasking, yes?
> 
> Except all the interaction between the tasks and the application 
> occurred _within_ the 'accept' blocks.  Meaning a message would come on 
> the socket and into the socket-monitoring task, rendezvous and block on 
> the buffering task, which would rendezvous and block on the message 
> processing task, which would generate output that would rendezvous and 
> block on the output buffering task, which would rendezvous and block on 
> the output socket transmission task, which then write out the message, 
> followed by unblock, unblock, unblock, etc.  I am not making this up.
> 
> I characterized this as the world's most expensive procedure call chain.
> 

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Marin David Condic
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