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Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 07:57:12 -0500
From: Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>
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Subject: Re: What exactly is the licensing situation with GNAT?
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Date: 2014-11-14T07:57:12-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, Stan Mills wrote:

> I have seen guys who never wrote a program from scratch in any language, 
> and who can't understand or code any algorithm at all. But they are able 
> to build huge ivory towers of applications based on nothing but other 
> people's libaries. Everything is a black box to them and if you ask how 
> it works all they can explain is how to invoke the methods they used.

Isn't this exactly the idea of abstraction and data hiding, not to mention 
software reuse? In the old days everyone wrote everything from scratch. 
What you described sounds like progress to me.

After all we don't expect programmers, even software engineers, to write 
their own compilers, assemblers, and operating systems. Those things are 
just black boxes.

I suppose one could argue that a professional software engineer should be 
capable of writing such things if they needed to, but that they only 
choose not to because it's not cost effective. So perhaps what you are 
really saying is that 99% of programmers are just not capable of writing 
the kinds of libraries they routinely use.

Peter