From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,e7ceb00d83425e3a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!u36g2000prf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "jhc0033@gmail.com" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: rant (Re: Ada featured in Doctor Dobb's Journal ) Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 23:30:54 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <31a97103-1cbb-47b5-a93c-2a29c206556f@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> <0d254195-50cb-4bad-b776-8d5c2ab09b6c@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 75.26.46.184 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1211005854 32665 127.0.0.1 (17 May 2008 06:30:54 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 06:30:54 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: u36g2000prf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=75.26.46.184; posting-account=ZDEUcwoAAAAfEl68GET6fODebgE-CIe2 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:140 Date: 2008-05-16T23:30:54-07:00 List-Id: On May 16, 5:28 am, Mike Silva wrote: > On May 16, 6:56 am, Ludovic Brenta wrote: > > > An opinion piece from Joachim Sch=FCeth, 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=3D5 because we can use it to justify some teachings".