Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice for a beginner to programming?

["Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com>]

I hate to feed the trolls (ok maybe not)...But even if Ada were to vanish
off the face of the Earth, many of the concepts that I have heard others
complain about over the years have been adopted by the current "popular"
languages...

I am not sure about Dijkstra's complaints (here are some
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD663.PDF
but they do not seem to be real attacks on the language but more the
style of the spec. They also seem pretty valid)

Common ones I have heard over the years from others were

1) "Too complicated" (hmm, and C++ is easy)
2) "Exceptions, yuck, I want to return a status." (hmm, C++, C# and Java
seem to like them)
3) "Too slow." (hmm, and we all know what a speed freak Java is...)


There are others, some may even be true.
This is now two posts in two days for me. One replying to the classic VHS
v.s. BETA where Ada played the roll of Beta (better but still lost) and now
this one (worse and should have lost)....

It seems to me the #1 reason that Ada does not grow is much more simple.
People choose languages and
polititians the same way they pick teams in a Superbowl gambling pool. They
are more worried about picking the winner so they can be "right" then they
are about applying critical thinking and making an intellegent selection.




"faust" <urfaust@optushome.com.au> wrote in message
news:8ivo1vo5ir3piqsck4ondj0cuo47g426kf@4ax.com...
> Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> ,  emitted these fragments:
>
> >Dijkstra was also the guy who condemned various features of
> >Ada--features that have since been shown to be very valuable.
>
> Shown by whom ?
>
> The rapidly growing Ada community ?