Re: Is General Kind the harbinger of doom

[groleau@e7sa.crd.ge.com (Wes Groleau X7574)]

There has been posted disagreement on whether it's easy to learn Ada
and whether there is a shortage of people who know Ada.  My three cents:

It is definitely VERY easy (and I see lots of evidence daily) to learn enough
about any language to write what looks like a token-by-token translation
from the language you learned first.  Often in the style you learned first.

It's also easy in SOME languages to apply good software engineering principles
IF you have been trained in them OR if you have enough intelligence to 
recognize and adopt them when exposed to them in the workplace.

Unfortunately (judging by the people I've worked with/under/over) thirty
percent of the Ada programmers cannot write their native language (English)
much less Ada.  And the former problem has a "negative synergistic effect" on
the latter.

Another twenty percent have hard-coded into their brain that Ada is inferior
to (pick one) C, FORTRAN, LISP, FORTH, assembly, yes, even COBOL.  Their code
either attempts to prove their point or they "try to make the best of it" and
write as close to their <lang> style as they can stretch the LRM to allow.
Examples: (1) adopting the pervasive C bias against identifiers having
more than three characters or containing any vowels.  (In fairness to C
programmers, this bias not held by all--only a slight majority).  (2) One guy
went so far as to write an Ada procedure for each LISP function he wanted to
call, then wrote his program in a variant of LISP that left out the parentheses
and used semicolons instead of commas!  
in their <lang> styles to the most extreme limits of the LRM.