Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Bill Meahan wrote:
> Brian Rogoff wrote:
> 
> > For better or worse, many programmers will migrate to tools which are
> > superficially similar to tools that they already know (witness Java).
> 
> Precisely my point! So why aren't PL/SQL programmers migrating to Ada
> en' masse? I'm trying to :-)

I suspect because many PL/SQL programmers are really *just* database
programmers, and Ada is really a general purpose language. Many PL/SQL 
programmers don't need Ada or C++ since the specialized tools for their 
domain are substantially more productive if you don't need to do more than 
DB programming.

Have you taken a look at the Ada 95 DB bindings? I'm interested in how
much more work you think needs to be done to make a decent open source 
tool that could aid in your Ada evangelism. 

> BTW Besides PL/SQL I've programmed in Fortran (II, IID, IV, IVG, IVH,
> 66, 77) numerous dialects of Assembler from SPS to 8080 to 32-bit minis,
> FOCAL, BASIC (regular and Visual varieties), Perl, C, PIL, SH/KSH, Excel
> Macro, Remedy declarations and probably some others I've long since
> forgotten. 35+ years of programming is a long time :-)

Indeed. However, I'm of the opinion that if possible it is better to work
in *very* different programming languages to expand your mental problem
solving toolset. I actually consider Ada, C++, Fortran, Java, and many
others to be very similar (this isn't a troll BTW ;-). A representative 
sample of some different languages would include Haskell, Icon, Mercury, 
Common Lisp, Objective Caml, and Forth. In my field, the domain specific 
languages (analogous to Excel and PL/SQL) are Verilog and VHDL, where 
VHDL is an Ada-like language. I use Verilog because almost all of the ASIC 
designers in the valley do, but they are also quite similar.

> Right now, for no special reason other than personal enlightenment, and
> looking at what PL/SQL might have been if Oracle had left more Ada in
> it, I'm learning Ada. I'd like to have my programming staff at work
> leverage their PL/SQL knowledge into Ada and build some really robust
> applications but TPTB would probably hang me by my thumbs in front of
> the iTek building. Seems Ada has a reputatation (around most of the auto
> industry, anyway) of being a language for missle programmers and/or
> anal-retentive types who spend more time arguing chapter and verse of
> ARM or ARM95 than actually coding anything useful. Sorry, but that's the
> image TPTB have of Ada. They'd rather throw up crap "Web applications"
> quickly than build robust systems. Code quality ain't Job 1. If it were,
> our "enterprise architecture" would not be 100% Microsoft, that's for
> sure :-(

Well, you can hack in Ada too, and IMO it is a nice language to hack in 
once you know it becuase of the strong typing. Better hack/debug ratio. 
Not all Ada fans are language lawyerly types; I've been known to say
"Dude!" and curse like a sailor :-)

-- Brian