Re: Proving Correctness (was Java Portability)

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

nicolas <n.brunot@cadwin.com> wrote:
: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com> a ?crit dans le message news:
: 3B6636BA.96FD8348@home.com...
: 
: The problem is more about IDE, GUI and libraries, I know there are excellent
: debuggers for Ada [...]
: This is an excellent example of amazing capabilities, and incredible
: elementary problems as well.
: 
: To get back to the the original point, it was there is no integrated and
: frendly complete development kit for Ada, comparable to what any debutant
: find for popular languages.
: And unfortunately, a common Ada fan reaction to this is to give examples to
[safety]

You write about debutants, could you provide some reasoning why for
these people there should be a more full grown environment than AdaGIDE?
Is the Aonix product so far off for this group of people???


You could of course say, pressing F9 to get a runnable executable
is so much easier that getting to know Emacs & Co conventions (or whatever)
but that looks like a shortsighted self deception to me, at best.
Can you provide any convincing empirical data to show that a
Click-1-Button solution is better _for debutants_ than a
Get-to-Know-Your-Tools craftspeople approach? WRT Short term,
long term, programmer productivity, general knowledge of what
compilation tools do, ease of adaption to different
tools on different platforms... (Yes I know the lament of
debutants about the additional percentage of time devoted
to studying compiler/IDE docs, but I also know debutants and programmers
who actually _enjoyed_ learning about their toolset, because
of the interesting concepts and "visible" machinery. (And I'm
not debating the merits of powerful environments.)

To give an example, creating a project in your favourite Windows
IDE is possibly "just a matter of dragging this here and that
there and then chosing that from this drop down list and clicking
bang" (depends on you IDE, this was Visual Age for C++:-) But
this does in fact need learnuing as with every IDE (which have
extensive documentation, so can't be that simple really), and
likely entails non-portable build scripts (because the Click-1
programmer wouldn't know how to translate to a portable one, as there
is no button for this). (side note: I can't help thinking this
"Gimme an _easy_ IDE" thing has similar annoing side effects as
being proud on having autoconfed otherwise portable software.
Or as thinking "I know how to use my Word processor to its best
because I can see the printouts."  Ever compiled a book from
more than one authors, all using the "same" Word processor? ;-)

: - Ada has a lot of excellent qualities, but it is everything but popular.
: The lack of integrated environment 
[claimed by the author, but see above]
: and standard libraries coming with the
: compiler has certainly something to do with it.

What exactly? Certainly C++ became popular before there was
today's STL. Then, certainly many Ada compilers come with libraries,
since the RM has so much to say about them, e.g. for string
processing. So I guess you mean container libraries or similar?
Standard Database Interfaces? Numerical Algorithms? Graphics
libraries? Encryption libraries?

I'm sure you know both the old and the new Booch components
and see that the requested libraries have been there for a long
time. Only they are decoupled from each vendors compiler and
are free for download instead. Compare them to their equivalents
(more or less) in Java 2 (not 1!).
Would you agree that Ada will become more popular if every ADA IDE
comes with a sticker
		"Prebuilt
	Booch Components Inside"? 
Could be a point...



--  Georg
---
Microsoft Windows--a fresh perspective on information hiding