Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[aek@vib.usr.pu.ru (Alexander Kopilovitch)]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> Can't common people perceive scientifical concepts in the form of a
> vision?

Sad to say, they can't. Their recognition facilities aren't trained for that.
Science fiction literature in its best efforts tried to make a bridge for that,
but even the best authors - Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, Stanislav Lem, Boris
and Arkady Strugatsky - fell short of that; they mostly provided glimpses of
only human part of scientific environment, that is, human logic, human decision
mechanism etc. ... although some novels of them (especially of Asimov) may be
useful for an intermediate level, as it pertains to the scientific concepts.

> So the reason why religion is respected and science is not
> lies somewhere else than in a possibility to perceive the fruits of
> both. And fruits of science are far more visible than ones of anything
> other.

Fruits of science can't be directly visible. All good (or arguably good) fruits
of science must first pass through engineering, and only after that they become
visible (so the role of science becomes vague). Only bad/poisonous fruits of
science  occasionally can be visible directly.

> > but a typical program in
> >Visual Basic surely may be converted from old to new compiler without much
> >effort. And if it appears inconvenient for conversion, it may be simply
> >rewrote from old source code. No big deal usually, even for average Basic
> >programmer.
> 
> Which would be indeed an excellent maintenance perspective ...

Not so bad, really. Probably you will have some burden, but for that you have
vast pool of resources. and most probably you'll never have to hire a costly
expert. At least it is honest, without any hype; with that you have some sort
of upper estimate: the cost of maintanance (per month) most probably will not
exceed the cost of development (per month); probably it will be much less, but
this will depend on external factors.



Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia