Re: Ada in Iraq

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Wesley Groleau wrote:
> I'd put it slightly differently: the same programmers
> who screwed up because they tried to develop a system in
> a language they weren't capable of learning, will
> screw up a system in any language for the same reason.

It's not really incapability of learning. It's a matter of
trying to use a language with only a cursory understanding
of it, instead of a deep one. When you do that, you're going
to fail, or at least "succeed badly", because you will fail
to use the features of the language to their best advantage.
It's the old concept of being able to code Fortran in any
language. Think of how many posts in this newsgroup criticize
Ada newbies for trying to transliterate C into Ada instead of
learning how things should be done properly in Ada. Now imagine
them actually going off to build a system in that style.

Without an expert in Ada around to supervise the training, the
people learning Ada aren't going to know when they've learned
enough about the language to use it properly.