Re: ADA vs Java

[The Wogster <wogsterca@yahoo.ca>]

Ted wrote:
> Writing code in ADA 95 and compiling it for the JVM should produce more
> reliable code than writing in Java 2. Does anyone know any good technical
> reasons for prefering Java?
> 

The argument is more like, which language has a more reliable 
conversation, French or German?  Well people have been having 
conversations in both, for hundreds of years.

For reliability, a far more important aspect is the experience of the 
one who is writing the code, and what is their background.

Back to our human languages for a minute, suppose you know neither one, 
if you know Spanish or Italian then you will probably have more luck 
with French as they are all based on Latin.  If you have Austrian or to 
a lesser degree Dutch, many words and phrases are similar to German, so 
you will probably have more luck with it.

If your background in programming is C or C++, you will have better luck 
with Java, as many things are very similar.  If you come from a Pascal 
background you probably would find Ada easier.  No programming language 
is 100% safe, although some like C will provide you enough rope to hang 
yourself -- realistically C will provide the rope, tree, support, 
minister, and a handy helper, but that is beside the point.

The biggest issues with reliability are type safety and memory sanity 
checking.  Both languages take care of these reasonably well.

The problem for Ada is that most modern operating systems are written in 
C and documented in a C style, so most programming students learn C or 
C++ if nothing else.  Mind you, I still think that Pascal is probably 
the best teaching language for the basics......

W