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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fac41,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public X-Google-Thread: 109fba,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-Thread: f43e6,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gidf43e6,public X-Google-Thread: 114809,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid114809,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: OO, C++, and something much better! Date: 1997/01/26 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 212274075 references: <32DFD972.37E4@concentric.net> <5bphq4$5js@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <32E987FC.1FF2@rase.com> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.object,comp.software-eng Date: 1997-01-26T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Tansel said ">What is highly debatable? I have used C++ for a long time and now I am >using Smalltalk, and there is NO comparison in development times. They >are simply different categories. Turtle vs. Rabbit." Yes, an apt reference to the fable, and I trust you remember who wins the race between the Tortoise and the Hare (which is the translation of the Greek I am used to, but I doubt we know precisely what animals Aesop was describing to this level of detail). In this case, the reason for the tortoise winning may well be found in the long term maintenance and life cycle costs. Yes, langauges like Smalltalk are certainly handy for quick prototyping, but who knows what the long term life cycle cost effects will be -- answer: no one, because commercial use of Smalltalk is too new to have more than scattered data. Again, noticing that Ada is on the list of xpostings, it is interesting to note that the first Ada translator (Ada/Ed) was written in a dynamically typed language (SETL -- which is a very high level language oriented around high level set operations, or more precisely ZF-set operations, where general mappings play a critical role. It is a garbage collected langguage with pure value semantics (e.g. no pointers). It is indeed a highly effective prototyping language, and allowed us to get something working quickly. However, in retrospec, we felt one of the big weaknesses of SETL was precisely the dynamic typing. If your data structures are such that only an integer makes sense in a particular context, then it is nice to have this statically checked, instead of letting an accidental assignment of some incorrect type cause chaos down the road. These days it is quite entertaining to see a whole new generation of programmers introduced for the first time to dynamic typing, but of course it is not new at all (LISP is almost as old as Fortran), but in my opinion, anything that the compiler can do for you is valuable. What you will find programmers saying in the Ada and Alogol-68 worlds is that it is often hard work to get the program past the compiler, but once past, it works the first time. Ada programmers often don't paricularly care about debuggers -- ask a roomful of Ada programmers whether they find debuggers useful, and maybe half will say they regard them as critical. By contrast, when I suggested the idea that debuggers were not that important to Gabriel (of Lisp fame, sorry I forget his first name) he thought it was a huge joke, the very *idea* that someone could do without a debugger -- it actually set him laughing :-) Someone actually posted earlier to this thread the idea that it was pretty useless to have the compiler verify type invariants, because debugging would find the errors easily. It is positively scary that there are programmers around who could say this with a straight face. But then any exposure to the general community of programmers is a very frightening experience :-)