memory management and productivity

[18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ)]

The following is an excerpt from an article featured on Slashdot today
(6/16/04). The excerpted paragraph is not even the main topic of the
article, but it made wonder what chance Ada has in the future without
automatic memory management. It seems to me that garbage collection
should be optional within the language.

excerpt from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

How Microsoft Lost the API War
By Joel Spolsky

...

A lot of us thought in the 1990s that the big battle would be between
procedural and object oriented programming, and we thought that object
oriented programming would provide a big boost in programmer
productivity. I thought that, too. Some people still think that. It
turns out we were wrong. Object oriented programming is handy dandy,
but it's not really the productivity booster that was promised. The
real significant productivity advance we've had in programming has
been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. It can
be with reference counting or garbage collection; it can be Java,
Lisp, Visual Basic (even 1.0), Smalltalk, or any of a number of
scripting languages. If your programming language allows you to grab a
chunk of memory without thinking about how it's going to be released
when you're done with it, you're using a managed-memory language, and
you are going to be much more efficient than someone using a language
in which you have to explicitly manage memory. Whenever you hear
someone bragging about how productive their language is, they're
probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory
management, even if they misattribute it.