Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

By "niche-market" I mean that it is not responsible for, say, 60% of all
software written everywhere. I'm not sure why that doesn't seem obvious.
Does one regularly see, say 1/3 of all programmer positions offered in the
newspaper being for Smalltalk or Forth programmers? By that standard, I am
simultaneously including Ada in the "niche-market" category.

The point is this: If you want to study the impact of Ada vs C++, it is a
lot easier to find something that is being done in C++ (because of the large
number of projects) where you can possibly inject Ada into the mix and see
if it works better. Likewise, one might compare Smalltalk to C++ by finding
a C++ project that could be supplanted or duplicated in some manner. But if
Ada doesn't have the same massive following as C++ and Smalltalk doesn't
have as massive a following as C++ are you going to be able to find an
opportunity to replace Smalltalk with Ada or the other way around?

One can always contrive experiments, but a lot of industry studies are done
based on some practical project(s) where enough information is available to
look at and get an understanding of what happens. You might have a dozen
similar C++ products in a company and somehow convince management "Hey,
let's do the next one in Ada and see if it works better..." and because of
similarity you might be able to draw some conclusions that Ada did a
better/worse job. That's the kind of scenario I was thinking of.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Darren New" <dnew@san.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3CD1652C.5A4736@san.rr.com...
>
> Errr, this is odd. What do you think the "niche market" is for Smalltalk
> or Forth? Do you really think Smalltalk's market is more of a "niche"
> than Ada's?
>
> Now, if you'd said that Atlas is a niche language, or Postscript is a
> niche language, or YACC is a niche language, I'd agree with you. But by
> what criterion is Smalltalk or Forth a niche language?
>