Re: Is marketing speak in Ada wikibook o.K.?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 7:14:42 AM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> The following two sentences are from the wikibook on Ada Programming
> (which seems somewhat prominent). They start the section on generics.
> 
> "The idea of code reusability arises because of the necessity to construct
>  programs on the basis of well established building blocks that can be
>  combined to form an ampler and complex system. The reusability of code
>  improves the productivity and the quality of software."
> 
> No offense intended, but do they actually say much at all?
> Do they teach generics, specifically?
> To me, they sound almost---without wanting to rebuke authors--like
> having been dropped from Gautier's CBSG.

I don't have a problem with it.  Too much "cheerleading" would be embarrassing, but this doesn't seem like too much, and it can't hurt to remind programmers to try to write code in a way that parts of it can be reused.  I do have a problem with the word "ampler", though, which is not a word I've ever heard or seen used in English--and I'm a native (American) English speaker, 51 years old.  It looked like a typo at first.  Even when I figured out that it wasn't a typo and figured out what the word was, it still was confusing.  My guess is that this was written by a non-native English speaker, and they just meant "bigger" but perhaps tried to use a thesaurus to come up with a more interesting word, which doesn't always work if you don't have a good understanding of the connotations.

                            -- Adam