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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c78177ec2e61f4ac X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: jsa@alexandria.organon.com (Jon S Anthony) Subject: Re: C++ usage (was Re: ada and robots) Date: 1997/06/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 253056134 Distribution: world References: Organization: PSI Public Usenet Link Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-06-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article Brian Rogoff writes: > > is not a rational choice. The really odd thing is that IME I've seen > > people actually admit this was true (that an alternative would > > actually make more sense all around), but then choose C++ anyway > > "because that is what is being used in the industry". That's > > basically irrational. > > In other words, people who had the choice admit that they made what they > thought (before they committed) was the wrong choice? That is correct. But, as someone else pointed out, they would not say that outright except among themselves. > I'd be curious about the management/economic issues you cite. The > more ammo the better. Simply this: it was _clear_ that a) things would be done better and cheaper if X were used _and_ b) that there would be happier and more enthusiastic employees as they wanted to use X, understood why X would make their life better, knew X (more did than not), and liked X. > Understandable that they might feel that way, as programming in Lisp is > far different from programing in Ada. Lisp environments tend to really > support an exploratory style of programming (hacking ;-) which can be > quite useful at times. Exactly. We use it here for much of our exploratory proof of concept and proto-type work. > OCAML, which is a member of the ML family of languages, is an impure > functional language, like Scheme, which is statically typed, has a module > system supporting separate compilation, and an object system. Like SML, > you don't have to explicitly type variables, as the compilers do type > inference. For long lived code, I'm not so sure this is good, since > explicit types provide documentation for dumber programmers like me. OTOH, > combined with an interpreter, it feels like an Ada-esque Lisp with its > static typing. See http://pauillac.inria.fr/ocaml/ for details. Kewl. I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip. > > Well, OK you got me. Still, in general, people wouldn't actually > > suggest using Perl for any sort of large scale programming - would > > they?? > > Yes. I have talked to members of several commercial projects which use > Perl for large scale programming. One of them was switching to Java because > the Perl code had become unmaintainable in their opinion. And people wonder why software is in such an execrable state. Criminey... /Jon -- Jon Anthony OMI, Belmont, MA 02178 617.484.3383 "Nightmares - Ha! The way my life's been going lately, Who'd notice?" -- Londo Mollari