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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b99897135d6631cc,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: 18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: memory management and productivity Date: 16 Jun 2004 21:56:23 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 63.194.87.148 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1087448184 27757 127.0.0.1 (17 Jun 2004 04:56:24 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 04:56:24 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1600 Date: 2004-06-16T21:56:23-07:00 List-Id: 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.