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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-18 11:46:45 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: aek@vib.usr.pu.ru (Alexander Kopilovitch) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? Date: 18 Sep 2003 11:46:43 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: <8mgdmv08eaabv53vv5sofud2k40lbo0fdh@4ax.com> <6roimvg39s8h5ba64u9pn0trsa4d3u4kai@4ax.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.221.48.176 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1063910805 19700 127.0.0.1 (18 Sep 2003 18:46:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 18 Sep 2003 18:46:45 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42662 Date: 2003-09-18T18:46:45+00:00 List-Id: 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