rant (Re: Ada featured in Doctor Dobb's Journal )

["jhc0033@gmail.com" <jhc0033@gmail.com>]

On May 16, 5:28 am, Mike Silva <snarflem...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On May 16, 6:56 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>
> > An opinion piece from Joachim Schüeth, the winner of the British
> > National Museum of Computing's Colossus Cipher Challenge.
>
> >http://www.ddj.com/architect/207800151
>
> > --
> > Ludovic Brenta.
>
> Good stuff.  Another statement of what I have read here so often, that
> Ada is very good at letting one model the problem space rather than
> having to work backwards from the solution space.
>
> Mike

People more familiar with language X than Y find that they spend less
time thinking about the language when programming in X rather than Y.

Personally, I'd find the article more interesting if the main
character was, say, a competent C++ programmer (the kind that
understands destructor semantics, etc., uses STL containers throughout
and Boost where suitable), and having switched to Ada (or the other
way around) had something interesting to say.

Right now, the article basically says: "Fortran had some cool features
C didn't have, but C had some features Fortran didn't have, and we
switched to C. But this guy uses Ada, because as we saw before, using
different languages is OK, and the safety community uses it. He solved
some discrete math problem he was trying to solve. He could have
solved it just as easily in any other language perhaps, but would we
write an article about it? The end".

Right now, I'm evaluating Ada as a language to learn and do my next
project in. I already know more diverse non-mainstream languages than
most people, so I'm not exactly closed-minded. But this article hasn't
convinced me of anything.

A few days ago, I looked at Eiffel, and I'm now convinced that I
wouldn't like it. Eiffel targets a largely similar audience of
"correctness-oriented" programmers that Ada does. However, it took
some digging around (no introductions to the language mention it) to
discover that Eiffel has a gap in its type system. Guess what, type
theory is a branch of math, and OOP is a spiritual following. I know
what takes precedence in my book. The Eiffel community's attitude is
basically: "we'll just pretend 2+2=5 because we can use it to justify
some teachings".