Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Richard Riehle wrote:

> Language advocacy can be an entertaining activity on a cold winter's
> evening, but even the most ardent enthusiasts for one language or another
> will eventually admit that languages are nothing more than tools for
> composing computer programs.   The good craftsperson selects the
> appropriate tool for the job at hand.

Not really.  Programming languages are also tools for thinking.  And 
different languages favor different ways of thinking.  This effect can 
also be seen in spoken languages you can't understand the French and the 
people of Quebec unless you can think in French.  (I am the first to 
admit I can't.  I can try, but I find the exercise very strenuous.  I 
need to literally accept a foreign viewpoint to do it well and I am 
unwilling to do so.  The cultural baggage with Arabic and Chinese is 
larger that that which comes with French, but it isn't as imperialistic.

Japanese on the other hand, is much more demanding than French,  but in 
another sense it is not as hard.  Japanese requires you to act in 
certain ways, but it doesn't try as hard to impose its worldview on you. 
  However, the worldview that comes with Japanese is pretty nasty. 
Note, this does not say that Japanese are nasty. However, I have found 
that there is a huge difference in world view between those Japanese who 
speak English and those who don't, I don't know if this holds true for 
those who speak only another Asian as opposed to European language.  I 
haven't studied Russian in decades, but I remember it as being like the 
Germanic langauges.  They do fit your discription above.  They are tools 
and can be used in many different ways.

> ...The religiofication of language arguments leads nowhere.   Reasonable
> people must understand that languages are designed by people, and every
> language is flawed in one way or another.  We must admit the flaws in our
> preferred language before the other fellow will admit the flaws in
> his/her preferred language.  As we do so, we might just come up with some
> ideas for the next improved language rather than remain paralyzed with
> the our current favorite.

I don't disagree, but I am going to draw a very different parallel with 
religion.  In the sermon this Sunday, our minister who worked in 
marketing for decades before going to seminary, drew an interesting 
comparison between "the church" and corporations.  He was talking about 
how corporate structures were designed to be conservative, in the sense 
that they are designed to preserve and enhance the corporation. 
Products and customers, while important, are secondary.  I corporation 
can switch products or switch products, if necessary for the survival of 
the company.

The church is different.  We can't walk away from the message and we 
really are failing if we chose to target a particular market.  It may be 
a good strategy for the short term survival of the organization, but at 
the same time we can't tailor the message to a particular market.  (We 
can package the message differently--but that is starting to get away 
from the point I would like to make.)

So on one hand we have the church organization, and there is a strong 
tendancy to make it as comfortable as possible for "our kind of 
Christian."  As I said above, nothing wrong with that if it is confined 
to packaging--the way the building is decorated, which hymns we sing, 
even the scheduled time for the Sunday service.  But we can't lose sight 
of the important fundamentals that can't be changed if we still want to 
be Christians.  (And again the doctrinal differences between various 
denominations are way off topic here.  But the parallels in programming 
languages are on topic in the next paragraph. ;-)

So we have three levels of competing priorities, and it is the job of 
the Elders to insure that we get those priorities straight.  The rest of 
the sermon was about the fundamental conservative nature of any 
organization such as a church, and the revolutionary nature to religion 
as such.

We have similar levels in programming languages and a similar problem 
with organizational conservatism.  Notice that there is a need for 
conservatism that can't be ignored.  Fixing the roof may not be the 
primary mission of the church.  On the other hand having the building 
collapse and kill half the congregation is not acceptable.

In the programming language arena, there are three groups of 
"stakeholders."  There are those whose responsibility is to keep the 
language consistant and usable.  There are also current users who don't 
want to be forced to learn new features.  Finally there are the language 
evangelists, who want to use the language in new market segments, and 
think that the language would be perfect if the langauge maintainers 
would only add a few dozen small changes. ;-)

In programming languages the ultra-conservative role of church doctrine 
is the job of the language lawyers.  Any major programming language has 
a maintenance organization which is by nature very conservative, and 
with good reason.  If (in the case of Ada) the ARG doesn't do its job 
right, the result is not just a loss of users.  Languages can be made 
unsuitable for their current role, and the result is usually something 
similar to a religous schism.

A perfect example of this was Algol 68.  It was a huge change from Algol 
60, and the net result was a schism.  Wirth put his alternate proposal 
"on the table" Algol-W, and a large portion of the current Algol 60 
users switched to Algol-W and then to Pascal.  Algol 68 was a nice 
language once decent documentation existed, and several good compilers 
were eventually available.  But the programmers who wanted to use Algol 
68 included very few Algol 60 programmers.

On the other hand if the ARG doesn't keep the language "relevant," 
eventually the user community will wither away to nothing.  The Ada 
community is currently growing, but not nearly as fast as the overall 
demand for programmers.  (I should say as fast as the overall demand for 
software engineers, but let's keep to one religious war at a time.)

I think that the ARG is maintaining the correct balance.  Those who 
don't want change are not screaming about the proposed changes in Ada 
0Y, and the evangelists are not satisified, but it is their nature to be 
unsatisfied.

There will always be those who are unwilling or unable to tolerate the 
almost glacial pace of change.  Fine.  For those people there are 
boutique languages and languages du joir.  And I am not denigrating that 
need.  There have been several projects I worked on where we developed 
project specific languages.  But the toolset we used were based on an 
existing major production language, with a set of translation tools for 
the modified language.

One good example of a language that started out that way was C++. 
Another was Object Ada which added object oriented features to Ada 83. 
Object Ada was made obsolete by Ada 95, but C++ is now a separate 
language development tree from C.  (And it will stay that way.  The 
market for C is now different enough from the market for C++ as to be 
almost disjoint.)  Of course for every seed that finds nourishing soil 
and grows, hundreds of others fall on barren ground.

But the language evangilists want someone else to do the job of 
developing their concept of a perfect language for them.  It can never 
happen.  If they learn how to use the tools, they can develop your own 
language and do all the maintenance themselves.  Or if they win the 
Powerball lottery, they may be able to hire someone to do it for them.

But otherwise it is just a huge job.  My guess is that just the Ada 0Y 
changes including proposals and reviews will be on the order of a man 
century of work. If you want to argue that it is only a couple of man 
decades, I hear you and don't.  You have to count the effort by current 
langauge users to learn the changes, the compiler developers who have to 
modify their compilers, the textbook authors who have to update their 
texts, and so on.  Yes, at the core of all this, between the ARG and 
WG9, there are several dozen people who average less than three months a 
year working on standards related issues.

However, we can't forget that any changes we agree to will eventually 
have a much larger effect on the Ada community as a whole.  That is in 
part what makes the organizational parts of the Ada community so 
conservative.  Of course, if there is a bug in the current standard, and 
different compilers do different things, then we don't need to be 
conservative, and we aren't.  We might as well choose whatever is best 
in the long run for the Ada community, because the "extra" effort to 
understand the problems and the fix is going to have to be spent in any 
case.

So if you want Ada to change, be patient.  However, if you want any 
changes which make the language unacceptable to its current users, 
forget it.  If you identify a new need that can't be satisifed by any 
version of Ada which satisfies current users, go off and do your own 
thing.  (Or for that matter a new version of C++, C, Pascal or COBOL.)

It won't be the first time.  Some such efforts have been drawn back into 
the fold, like Object Ada.  Others such as VHDL and SPARK identified a 
market that was sufficiently different so that the right solution was to 
develop separate tool chains.  (SPARCK is a "pure" Ada subset, so it can 
be compiled by normal Ada compilers.  But you also have to run the 
source through the SPARK Examiner to have correct SPARK code.)

And I am not trying to "blow off" reasonable extension proposals.  I am 
just trying to describe the sort of thinking we go through before making 
ANY language change.  If you just make a three paragraph recommendation 
of an idea that looks identical to one that was worked out in minute 
detail by the ARG and rejected by WG9, don't be surprised when we say it 
won't fly, and don't want to go into details.  The details may involve 
dozens to hundreds of hours (and pages) of discussions.  (You can 
usually find them at www.ada-auth.org  and if you aren't willing to read 
what is there, thoroughly, you can see why I and other ARG members 
sometimes get frustrated.



-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, 
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