Re: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit addressing and OOP

[xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan)]

Tom Welsh <news@tom-welsh.co.uk> wrote:
> Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> writes:
>> Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote:

>>> The language is structured around a
>>> few simple principles.

>> Which seem to be "simple" only in the
>> minds of computer language theorists,
>> not in the minds of us mere
>> programmers, to whom the reasons for
>> which these principles are
>> meritorious and why they should
>> govern our lives are still quite
>> convincingly opaque.

> Which "computer language theorists"
> are you talking about? Surely not Jean
> D. Ichbiah, Bernd Krieg-Bruechner,
> Brian A. Wichmann, Henry F. Ledgard,
> Jean-Claude Heliard, Jean-Loup Gailly,
> Jean-Ryanmond Abrial, John G. P.
> Barnes, Mike Woodger, Olivier Roubine,
> Paul N. Hilfinger, and Robert Firth.

> Do you actually know any of these people?

Not a one, I participated in ANSI X3H3
computer graphics programming language
standards efforts, not the Ada ANSI
X3J-whatever standards efforts.

> Have you heard of them?

Jean Ichbiah, Jean-Loup Gailly, John
Barnes, Paul Hilfinger, and Robert Firth
are familiar names to me, the rest are
not. I twice owned a copies of John
Barnes textbooks on learning Ada
programming, but they were lost to me in
the disintegration of one marriage or
another.

> Maybe very clever, experienced
> programmers sometimes seem like
> "computer language theorists" to
> programmers who are not quite so
> clever or experienced.

Nice try, but with 41 years programming
experience and a wealth of algorithmic
inventions to my name, you'll have to
find someone else to slander.

I merely lack the level of specific
formal education in computer language
design that make most of what the OP
thinks of as "simple principles" look
simple when reduced to standards-ese, or
look simple when trying to convince
other mid-level and junior programmers
that Ada is an "easily understood
language".

If that claim were true, the years of
language lawyering that have filled and
continue to fill comp.lang.ada would not
have been necessary. In the case, Ada is
conceptually an extremely difficult
language to understand, and I'm not sure
why that needed to be so.  Pascal [from
which Ada mostly derives], at least in
its early incarnations, is in contrast
supremely easy to understand from the
practicing programmer's viewpoint, which
made it a splendid learning langauge and
quite fair in practice as well.

> When you are programming away on your
> Intel-based or Sparc-based computer,
> do you often pause to contemplate the
> foolishness of the chip designers, who
> followed principles that are not
> entirely clear to you?  Or do you just
> learn how to use the results of their
> work?

Well, no, I bothered to learn why and
how the chips work the way they do, down
to the gate level originally, in higher
level chunks more recently.

[Not all that many people in the world
have ever memorized the logic gates and
software running therein of an entire
computer, but I am one of that few [not
that it was all that complicated a
computer: the guidance computer for the
Polaris Missile; and I did it as a way
to gain promotion in my military
specialty, not for the sheer joy of the
task]].

[Do you often answer months-old articles
and expect current answers?  Are you not
often disappointed?]

xanthian.