Re: rant (Re: Ada featured in Doctor Dobb's Journal )

[Mike Silva <snarflemike@yahoo.com>]

On May 17, 2:30 am, "jhc0...@gmail.com" <jhc0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 16, 5:28 am, Mike Silva <snarflem...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On May 16, 6:56 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>
> > > An opinion piece from Joachim Schüeth, the winner of the British
> > > National Museum of Computing's Colossus Cipher Challenge.
>
> > >http://www.ddj.com/architect/207800151
>
> > > --
> > > Ludovic Brenta.
>
> > Good stuff.  Another statement of what I have read here so often, that
> > Ada is very good at letting one model the problem space rather than
> > having to work backwards from the solution space.
>
> > Mike
>
> People more familiar with language X than Y find that they spend less
> time thinking about the language when programming in X rather than Y.

But if anything the article suggests that, while more familiar with
language X (16 years) than language Y (1/2 year), he spent less time
thinking about the language when programming in _Y_ rather than _X_.
I don't see how you can possibly come to the conclusion you state from
the article.
>
> Right now, the article basically says: "Fortran had some cool features
> C didn't have, but C had some features Fortran didn't have, and we
> switched to C. But this guy uses Ada, because as we saw before, using
> different languages is OK, and the safety community uses it. He solved
> some discrete math problem he was trying to solve. He could have
> solved it just as easily in any other language perhaps, but would we
> write an article about it? The end".

If he could have solved it just as easily in any other language, why
would he write about being pleasantly surprised at the features in Ada
that allowed him to write his software in two months even though he
was only a novice in the language?  There is just no way you can
represent from the text of the article that the author's key point was
"I could have solved this problem just as easily in any other
language."

Mike