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: 103376,29fe9a340e0d180d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Depending on passing mechanism Date: 1997/10/21 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 282304223 References: X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 877481248 21371 (None) 128.122.140.58 Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-10-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Henry Baker says <> 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!