Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Ludovic Brenta]

Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
as Eiffel programmers.

--
Ludovic Brenta.
How many degrees does humour have?

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 01:01:54 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
> programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
> approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
> the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
> a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
> as Eiffel programmers.

I agree with the conclusion, but not with the way you came to it. (:-))

Yes it looks plausible that Ada is more popular than Eiffel, but measuring
it by number of responses is barely representative.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[lanceboyle]

On Jun 4, 1:23 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 01:01:54 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> > Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
> > programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
> > approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
> > the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
> > a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
> > as Eiffel programmers.
>
> I agree with the conclusion, but not with the way you came to it. (:-))

Uh, I believe that Ludovic was making a joke.

Jerry

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 4 juin, 10:01, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
> programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
> approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
> the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
> a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
> as Eiffel programmers.
>
> --
> Ludovic Brenta.
> How many degrees does humour have?

Like Dimitry, I'm not sure such a conclusion can comes from such a
fact. But it is sure by the way that Ada is more widely used than
Eiffel. Ada is more impressive than Eiffel. May be somebody (I did it)
come first to Eiffel and then after goes to Ada, after they understand
that Eiffel cannot fulfill requirements of real world.

What is sure, is that Ada user like the spirit of Eiffel, and Bertrand
Meyer, the author of Eiffel, was largely inspired from Ada.

There is a kind of friendship between Ada and Eiffel.

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Martin]

On Jun 4, 12:55 pm, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> On 4 juin, 10:01, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>
> > Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
> > programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
> > approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
> > the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
> > a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
> > as Eiffel programmers.
>
> > --
> > Ludovic Brenta.
> > How many degrees does humour have?
>
> Like Dimitry, I'm not sure such a conclusion can comes from such a
> fact. But it is sure by the way that Ada is more widely used than
> Eiffel. Ada is more impressive than Eiffel. May be somebody (I did it)
> come first to Eiffel and then after goes to Ada, after they understand
> that Eiffel cannot fulfill requirements of real world.
>
> What is sure, is that Ada user like the spirit of Eiffel, and Bertrand
> Meyer, the author of Eiffel, was largely inspired from Ada.
>
> There is a kind of friendship between Ada and Eiffel.

The enemy of your enemy is your friend...

I'll leave you to work out the common enemy! :-)

Cheers
-- Martin

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Pascal Obry]

Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) a �crit :
> What is sure, is that Ada user like the spirit of Eiffel, and Bertrand
> Meyer, the author of Eiffel, was largely inspired from Ada.

But he hates Ada for some reasons I have never understood... I talk to
him (back in 1990 or 1991) one time the reaction was so bad...

> There is a kind of friendship between Ada and Eiffel.

Except from the Eiffel inventor, sad but true!

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 4 juin, 19:05, Pascal Obry <pas...@obry.net> wrote:
> But he hates Ada for some reasons I have never understood... I talk to
> him (back in 1990 or 1991) one time the reaction was so bad...
>
Are you talking about Bertrand Meyer ?

> Except from the Eiffel inventor, sad but true!

What do you mean ?

How could he be inspired from a language he hated ?

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Pascal Obry]

Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) a �crit :
> Are you talking about Bertrand Meyer ?

Yes.

>> Except from the Eiffel inventor, sad but true!
> 
> What do you mean ?
> 
> How could he be inspired from a language he hated ?

Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
early days... IIRC, in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
there is very few (if any) references to Ada.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Olivier Scalbert]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
> early days... IIRC, in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
> there is very few (if any) references to Ada.
> 
Hi,

In the second edition of this book, there are around 75 references to 
Ada in the index.
And there is also a 20 pages chapter called "O-O programming and Ada".

By the way, in one of these pages, Oberon (which I completely forgot) 
was also mentioned !

Olivier.

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Pascal Obry]

Olivier Scalbert a �crit :
> In the second edition of this book, there are around 75 references to
> Ada in the index.
> And there is also a 20 pages chapter called "O-O programming and Ada".

Ok, so I've misremembered this part or I'm confused about which book it
was! Sorry about that.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Adam Beneschan]

On Jun 4, 10:38 am, Pascal Obry <pas...@obry.net> wrote:
> Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
> early days... IIRC,

No, YDNRC.

> in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
> there is very few (if any) references to Ada.

In the edition I'm looking at (1988), Chapter 18 is called "Object-
Oriented programming and Ada".  That's a whole chapter that discusses
this language (more than is done for any other individual language; C+
+ just gets a one-page subsection).  Plus, looking just at the index,
there appear to be 13 references to Ada outside of this chapter.  The
beginning of Chapter 3.5 says, "Modular languages such as Modula-2 and
Ada offer a first step towards more appropriate solutions."  (But I
guess that's not the same thing as saying he was "inspired" by it.)
Also, the Wikipedia entry for Eiffel lists Ada (along with Simula and
Z) as an influence---as a sidebar, with no attribution, so I don't
know how accurate that is.

A Google search didn't turn up much.  It appears that Meyer has some
criticisms of Ada, but I couldn't find anything that would indicate
that he hates it.  His Eiffel site has an article about the Ariane 5
crash, but he said there that the language couldn't really be blamed
because the problem could have been caught using Ada's exception
mechanism (even though I gather he doesn't like this mechanism) if the
programmers had used it properly.

                                     -- Adam

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Georg Bauhaus]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) a �crit :
>> Are you talking about Bertrand Meyer ?
> 
> Yes.
> 
>>> Except from the Eiffel inventor, sad but true!
>> What do you mean ?
>>
>> How could he be inspired from a language he hated ?
> 
> Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
> early days... IIRC, in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
> there is very few (if any) references to Ada.

The second edition is more eloquently discussing Ada 95.
Ada 83 is characterized "sophisticated", Ada 95 is blamed
for being overly complex, with examples, including LRM
nomenclature.  Similar comments can be found in
the SPARK book, BTW.  OOSC2 is the only reference I could find
to Jean Ichbiah's resignation letter, sent to the Ada 9X
reviewing group "after trying in vain for several years
to keep the extensions simple". (p.1095)

Meyer quotes from Ichbiah's letter:

 "A massive increase in complexity will result from 9X
adding one or more additional possibilites where Ada now
offers two. For example, 9X adds: [...]  access parameters
to in, out, and in out; tagged types, to normal types;
dispatched subprogram calls, to normal subprogram calls;
use type clause, to use package clause; [Other examples
skipped; overall 12 were included.] With 9X, the number
of interactions to consider is close to 60,000 since we
have 3 more possiblitities in each case (that is, 3**10)."

By contrast, there were comments explaining that Taft's
Ada 95 is more of a compiler writer's language than
Ichbiah's Ada 83.

The number of occurrences of the word "simple" in
OOSC2 is suspiciously high.  Most of them refer to
concepts embedded in Eiffel being simple.  I find this
a bit suspicious because complex problems cannot become
simple problems just because language concepts are
simple.  We would be writing assembly language, then.

For example, Ada has both variant records and variant
tagged records, both explicit discriminants and implicit
discriminants.  A tag can be seen as an implicit
discriminant.  The tag as a discriminant seems to be
an obvious choice when you implement OO starting from
Ada 83, doesn't it?  The tag discrimminates types.
But then, we still have discriminated records. Why?

This question is answered negatively in Meyer's OOSC2.
Use different types (or program logic) but not also
variant records.   Stroustrup says, we should see
wheter a minor distinction warrants different types.
And there still are reasons for tagless small records,
as Randy Brukardt has explained a few days ago.
So what is the right choice in language design?
Meyer favors simplicity---presuming, I guess, that,
without exception, managing polymorphic types,
relying on garbage collection, substituting many types
for richer language rules is better than using variant
records, their rules, case distinction, and struggling
compilers.

The latest issue with GNAT's discriminant handling,
reported here today by Alex Mosteo (base type is
interface, derived type has a discriminant) is yet
another case of GNAT crashing into the discriminating
knife.  Does this prove that Meyer has a point?

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Jean-Pierre Rosen]

Pascal Obry a �crit :

>> How could he be inspired from a language he hated ?
> 
> Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
> early days... IIRC, in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
> there is very few (if any) references to Ada.
> 
For the record, B. Meyer was the founder of the Ada group of AFCET,
which later became Ada-France. There is no doubt that Eiffel was
inspired by Ada.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[nobody]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Here is yet another statistical proof of Ada's success as a mainstream
> programming language: the thread "Ada vs Eiffel - Ada programmer
> approach" had 12 different contributors here on comp.lang.ada whereas
> the symmetric thread on comp.lang.eiffel had just one (the OP) and not
> a single response. Therefore, there are 12 times more Ada programmers
> as Eiffel programmers.

Perhaps you should try your conclusion at alt.folklore.statistics, which 
I hope exists because anything concerning statistics do not belong under 
sci. ;-)