Re: Misconception about Ada?

["Robert Deininger" <rdeininger@mindspring.com>]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 6:49 PM, Cesar Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote:
>Eric Raymon is writting a book on-line and has a particular paragraph
>which seems to me execessively perfunctory about Ada.
>
>Do you think it is worth to discuss this with him?
>
>http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/taoup/chapter3.html
>
>The pertaining part is "Why Not C?"

I take it this is the part you don't like:

"The arguments against C and C++ apply with equal force to other
conventional compiled languages such as Pascal, Ada, Algol, PL/I, Fortran,
and compiled Basic dialects. Despite occasional heroic efforts such as the
Eiffel/Sather family, the differences between conventional languages remain
superficial when set against their basic design decision to leave memory
management to the programmer. None is clearly superior to C/C++, and none
are in significant use in the Unix or Windows worlds. Accordingly we will
not survey them here."

Knowing nothing more about this author than I learned by skimming the
chapter, I suspect it would be a waste of time to discuss Ada with him.  I
guess he doesn't have a clue about Ada, but he thinks he knows quite a bit.
 Throwing all these languages in the same basket is silly.

I guess Ada is not suitable for the sort of programming he cares about:

"In 1996 a widely-reported and plausible estimate of community sizes held
that for every Python hacker there were five Tcl hackers and twelve Perl
hackers. "

Speak up, Ada hackers!  

---------------------------
Robert Deininger
rdeininger@mindspring.com