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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Why C++ is successful?
Date: 1998/08/14
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Date: 1998-08-14T00:00:00+00:00
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iJoe says

<<I recall many stories like this over the decades, starting in the days
when fortran was displacing assembly, and structured programming was just
coming into vogue, and continuing to the present.  All good fun, but there
was and is a significant unstated assumption at work: These stories
implicitly assume that all programmers are equally good, leaving only
choice of language to explain the result.  In fact, programmer
productivity varies by a factor of ten to one from best to worst, and this
order of magnitude difference will swamp language effects unless one of
the languages is truely unsuited to the task, which isn't usually the
case.

So, it's at least as likely that you are a much better programmer than
that young whippersnapper, at the very least more experienced, and Ada
versus XXX had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
>>

Actually this thread has little to do with Ada vsw XXX, and most certainly
Robert Eachus' post was not about this.

It was instead about the difference in styles between do-it-right-first-time
and hack-around-and-make-it-right-later.

Yes, of course there can be huge differences in productivity between programmers,
but I suspect an awful lot of people are not workiing in the manner that is
most efficient for them.

If writing correct code first time, without needing to do lots of
debugging and testing, seems an unachievable ideal, then perhaps you should
experiemtn with your style a little and give this apporoach a try, you may
surprise yourself!