Re: Proving Correctness (was Java Portability)

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

nicolas <n.brunot@cadwin.com> wrote:
: "Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> a ?crit dans le message
: news: 9kchn1$lng$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...

:> Almost every... May I again ask for evidence?

None has arrived, afaics.
 
: Have you ever met people considering that computers are just tools ?

Yes.

: the important point is that it must work more or less, be easy to use,
: nobody cares what's inside ...

you claim.

: Nobody cares if it comes from the evil Microsoft or the good whatever you
: want ...

evidence? Besides, I'm not saying, M$ is evil, whatever the truth
may be.

: Nobody wants to spend 5 hours reading a doc before a basic use of the
: product

you claim.  Book publishers might not agree. I could, as far as
Word processor users are concerned, but
hey, we talked about programmers considering Ada and chosing
an IDE and libraries, not coffe computer users you talk about now.

: You'd never accept to have to read the doc of a new car or motorbike before
: you can find where are the brakes ...
: Would you ?

_Before_ I by a car (oh, hopefully that will happen once more
some day :-) I try to find out what it is like. I think brakes
are at a much too basic level for an appropriate analogy.

: The day programmers will understand how the rest of the world thinks, this
: will be a giant step forward

I think the M$ marketing department has understood,
but the brave of course make every pedagogical effort
at saving the general public from believing that,
computing = clicking Windows. Life is not just business.
Please consider what is happening in schools: Word,
*not* text processing, is considered a basic skill to be taught
to children. Why? Because they think they are fulfilling
user (= labour market) requirements. Perceived user
requirements, listening to locally elected expert teachers.
That's shortsighted!


: Now, about all what we were talking about, I guess softwares would much
: better meet users requirements if programmers had not so much fun playing
: with computers.

Could you elaborate? Fun: I know of at least a few prominent
computer scientist who wrote a note _in favour of reintroducing
or keeping_ fun in programming (Knuth, Perlis, ...). There must
be some real world background to that...

Meeting your flavour of Windows user requirements:
And should we surrender to what you naively call "user
requirements"?  It is naive because user requirements, as you
have defined them in your recent postings, are not
necessarily free inventions of users but are of course largely
influenced by the pressure of large groups, peer groups,
the crowd, fashion, and other things I've mentioned during this
discussion. How many times have _you_ heard the sentence,
"I know you are right, but give me what everybody else has."?

Now back to Ada: From what we know about mass movements
in the small or in the large, we can conclude that they may
have desasterous effects. So it is a question of social
responsibility to _not_ surrender to your "user requirements"
if one can figure a way to avoid this. For example if in my software
it is essential to avoid one-off errors, then a language which
offers built-in support for catching them is a big win.
That comes first in times. If it helps to build a CD with
prebuild libraries and a basic IDE made from available
sources to foster the use of Ada by way of exploiting
the Visual Xyz delusion, then there is a chance to not only
make money, but also to help the world suffering less from
the consequences of overflow in programs written in a 
language where this may be considered endemic.

: Popular languages are used by a lot of people, more and more programming
: just for work, and having fun with everything but computers outside the
: office.
: So they are evolving to be useful tools, because those guys don't accept
: weird things you can only appreciate if you have fun with computers.

Hm, are you saying that only progrmmers having fun with their
computers after work accept to expose themselves to weird languages
like Ada? 

: If Ada doesn't go that way, we have to worry.
 

Well, I don't. Do as you like. Maybe you can start a
profitable project of building a very convincing debutant's
Ada CD? :-)