From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,26c98aaeafe861d2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-03-31 09:53:58 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: sparky!uunet!news.crd.ge.com!e7sa!groleau From: groleau@e7sa.crd.ge.com (Wes Groleau X7574) Subject: Re: Is General Kind the harbinger of doom Message-ID: Sender: usenet@crdnns.crd.ge.com (USENET News System) Nntp-Posting-Host: 144.219.40.1 Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 17:41:02 GMT Date: 1993-03-31T17:41:02+00:00 List-Id: 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 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 styles to the most extreme limits of the LRM.