Re: Heartbleed

[Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca>]

On 2014.04.18, 10:59 , Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
> On 4/17/2014 8:38 PM, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:
>> Le Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:35:47 +0200, Simon Clubley
>> <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:
>>
>
>>> If you think I am wrong, then, while telling me I am wrong :-),
>>> please also tell me why Ada isn't in much more wider use than it
>>> currently is.
>>
>> Because of the crowd and the economy. ... Recently (I don't know
>> the exact date), the university in the town I live in, decided to
>> give up with learning Ada, in favour of C/C++, for this exact
>> reason.
>>
>>
>
> But these are the effects of Ada not being used, and the causes?
>
> Or may be it is a cycle. Ada not being used as much, schools stop
> teaching it, and school stop teaching it causes Ada not being used
> much.

Yes: The anti-Hygrade effect.

	(A Canadian wiener brand; tagline:
        "More people eat Hygrade because they're fresher -
         they're fresher because more people eat them."

Ada's formalism is a put off for people who just want to get a program
up and running.  Ada is not for casual programming of any kind and for
serious programming it takes more planning and design - the good things
for aerospace and other safety-first systems that people do not have
patience for in more general apps.

So they turn to C.  Blech code follows.

      Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way
      programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came
      along would destroy civilization.

> As I said before many times, the cause of Ada not being popular, is
> lack of many useful packages organized and standardized in some way,
> to do many useful things, and not the language itself.

That's true to a degree but the real reason is C dominance.

-- 
"Big data can reduce anything to a single number,
  but you shouldn’t be fooled by the appearance of exactitude."
      -Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, NYT, 2014.04.07