Re: Depending on passing mechanism

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Henry Baker says

<<The whole Ada process was an interesting experiment, but the process
was fundamentally flawed.  You can't design a language without writing
a huge number of applications at the same time.  Ada's attempt to define
_and then cast in concrete_ a language before a significant literature
of applications had been programmed was fatal.  Furthermore, the early
(negative) feedback from actual programmers was not taken seriously, and
the process had acquired such political momentum that it could not be
redirected.>>

Well by this I assume that "actual programmers" = Henry Baker, and as
you know from Henry's style, this equation makes sense to him :-)

In fact the early feedback from actual programmers with regard to the
language (separating out early implementation difficulties) was almost
uniformly positive. Not so surprising, since a lot of code was written
during the T&E phase of the process, and these same people who had
positive reactions during the T&E phrase went on to use Ada for
all sorts of real applications very successfully. 

Yes, we all know that Henry doesn't like Ada, fair enough, anyone is 
entitled to their own opinions, but the attempt to equate Henry's
dislike with general dislike is I am afraid wishful thinking on his
part. I happen to think that Henry's technical views on Ada are almost
consistently warped by some very specific, rather odd, technical 
viewpoints, and almost always the exact things he likes are exactly
the things that I most dislike in language designs.

An excellent example of this is Henry's recent embrace of a viewpoint that
prefers side effects in expressions to be well defined and portable, while
I take the viwe that this is wholly evil!

By the way, it would be interesting to know what Henry thinks of Algol-68,
since this is a language that, unlike Ada, was "designed without writing
a huge number of applications, in fact virtually no testing of this kind
was done on the design". Henry, is A68 fundamentally flawed as well.

For that matter is any widely used language reasonable from your point of
view, or is it one of these cases where 99% of the programming world
is wrong and you are right?

Interesting incidentally how a technical argument with Henry almost always
ends up with him going off on a philosophical binge about how terrible
the whole of Ada is :-) Odd that he wastes his time even reading CLA!