InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Warren]

http://www.informationweek.com/news/development/tools/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=224202322

( http://tinyurl.com/y3bv647 )

An IDE With Lots To Like 
By Jonathan Erickson
InformationWeek
April 10, 2010 12:00 PM (From the April 12, 2010 issue) 

"...
All this feature richness is great, but at some point it runs the risk of 
feature bloat, bogging down resources and performance in the process. 
Remember the Ada programming language? Oft described as having everything 
including the kitchen sink, Ada was ahead of its time with object-
oriented and other capabilities. But its plethora of features was more 
than most developers could handle, and it never went mainstream. That's 
something the Visual Studio team should keep in mind."

When I think of "bloat", I think of PL/I. But I've used various
PL/I subsets and rather enjoyed using them in their day.  

I particularly wonder about his statement "Oft described as having 
everything including the kitchen sink". I've heard the language
described as "large" compiler wise (at least for the '80s),
but I don't think I ever heard the "kitchen sink" analogy. That
would imply luxurious or unnecessary features, which if he
understood Ada, should know better.

Warren

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Gautier write-only]

On 21 Apr., 15:35, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> cited:

> "...
> All this feature richness is great, but at some point it runs the risk of
> feature bloat, bogging down resources and performance in the process.
> Remember the Ada programming language? Oft described as having everything
> including the kitchen sink, Ada was ahead of its time with object-
> oriented and other capabilities. But its plethora of features was more
> than most developers could handle, and it never went mainstream. That's
> something the Visual Studio team should keep in mind."

Apparently the notion of bloat evolves with the time.
And a bloat (or something perceived as such) at time t sells bad,
whereas a definite hyper-bloat at time t+n sells well.
Is there any logic in it ? I guess it is largely a question of image,
marketing, "zeitgeist" and other soft factors.
A programmer who would have laughed at Ada's generics, when
reincarnated 20 or 30 years later, will perhaps find it normal to
swallow tons of those huge books which are designed to become obsolete
at the next version of Visual Studio...

There are positive points in this citation: 1) he remembers Ada! 2)
the comment "ahead of its time" is rather complimentary.
One might want to add "was and still is and probably will remain", if
you consider the features, regularly added to .Net languages, which
are borrowed from Ada.
But that is the "zeitgeist" part. For the moment, there is some
success at botoxing languages of the 60's.
______________________________________________________________
Gautier's Ada programming -- http://gautiersblog.blogspot.com/
NB: Pour une réponse directe, adresse e-mail sur...
http://www.fechtenafz.ethz.ch/wm_email.htm

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Warren]

Gautier write-only expounded in
news:60862edf-fdfb-4c68-a96c-fd6ccded599f@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com: 

> On 21 Apr., 15:35, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> cited:
> 
>> "...
>> All this feature richness is great, but at some point it runs the
>> risk of feature bloat, bogging down resources and performance in the
>> process. Remember the Ada programming language? Oft described as
>> having everything including the kitchen sink, Ada was ahead of its
>> time with object- oriented and other capabilities. But its plethora
>> of features was more than most developers could handle, and it never
>> went mainstream. That's something the Visual Studio team should keep
>> in mind." 
> 
> Apparently the notion of bloat evolves with the time.

Certainly memory and CPU speed have changed radically
since the introduction of Ada. So leaner compilers back
then may have been more relavant to the mainstream. But
today, a compile is not a "big thing" anymore.

> A programmer who would have laughed at Ada's generics, when
> reincarnated 20 or 30 years later, will perhaps find it normal to
> swallow tons of those huge books which are designed to become obsolete
> at the next version of Visual Studio...

Ya, I don't like seeing "systems" built in MS products
because you know that it will need the necessary "upgrade" 
soon after.  And of course, it won't be fully compatible
with what you've built today.

The middle ground is perhaps open systems, where things
do change over time, but is relatively stable. A recompile
might be necessary, but usually things stay "compatible".

Then there is the mainframe, where you have COBOL/ASM
processes running forever, with only minor compatible
OS upgrades. No recompiles involved (and maybe the
source code was also long ago lost ;-)

> There are positive points in this citation: 1) he remembers Ada! 2)
> the comment "ahead of its time" is rather complimentary.

But the idea that Ada is "bloat" doesn't exactly make
ppl want to check it out.

> One might want to add "was and still is and probably will remain", if
> you consider the features, regularly added to .Net languages, which
> are borrowed from Ada.
> But that is the "zeitgeist" part. For the moment, there is some
> success at botoxing languages of the 60's.

I was reading something recently about F#(?), where they
were espousing the idea of methods with "contracts". 

I don't get this- are not these method contracts just a bunch
of "pragma Assert()" statements?  If you have to spell out
what is valid in a "contract" - how is that any different 
than assertions in C/C++ or Ada?  Syntactic sugaring.

Maybe it is just me.

"Now get off of my lawn!"

Warren

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

We do not have to worry about all these things. Pretty soon, once HTML5 
takes hold, everyone will be programming web applications and using 
Javascript any way.

I bought my first javascript book the other day.

It is over folks, HTML and Javascript have won the war ;)

--Nasser

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[Warren]

Nasser M. Abbasi expounded in news:hqnm36$aof$1@speranza.aioe.org:

> We do not have to worry about all these things. Pretty soon, once HTML5 
> takes hold, everyone will be programming web applications and using 
> Javascript any way.
> 
> I bought my first javascript book the other day.
> 
> It is over folks, HTML and Javascript have won the war ;)
> 
> --Nasser

Never surrender!

Warren

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[@ 2010-04-21 20:57 UTC (permalink / raw)]

Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
> We do not have to worry about all these things. Pretty soon, once HTML5 
> takes hold, everyone will be programming web applications and using 
> Javascript any way.
> 
> I bought my first javascript book the other day.
> 
> It is over folks, HTML and Javascript have won the war ;)

Then we better make sure Ada powers the backend stuff!

There's already a solid foundation in AWS.  :o)

-- 
Regards,
Thomas L�cke

Email: tl at ada-dk.org
Web: http:ada-dk.org
IRC nick: ThomasLocke

Re: InformationWeek Gives Ada Black Eye

[BrianG]

Warren wrote:
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/development/tools/showArticle.jhtml?
> articleID=224202322
> 
> ( http://tinyurl.com/y3bv647 )
> 
> An IDE With Lots To Like 
> By Jonathan Erickson
> InformationWeek
> April 10, 2010 12:00 PM (From the April 12, 2010 issue) 
> 
> "...
> All this feature richness is great, but at some point it runs the risk of 
> feature bloat, bogging down resources and performance in the process. 
> Remember the Ada programming language? Oft described as having everything 
> including the kitchen sink, Ada was ahead of its time with object-
> oriented and other capabilities. But its plethora of features was more 
> than most developers could handle, and it never went mainstream. That's 
> something the Visual Studio team should keep in mind."
> 
> When I think of "bloat", I think of PL/I. But I've used various
> PL/I subsets and rather enjoyed using them in their day.  
> 
> I particularly wonder about his statement "Oft described as having 
> everything including the kitchen sink". I've heard the language
> described as "large" compiler wise (at least for the '80s),
> but I don't think I ever heard the "kitchen sink" analogy. That
> would imply luxurious or unnecessary features, which if he
> understood Ada, should know better.
> 
> Warren

I think he's confusing early opinions of Ada with early opinions of 
Java.  I believe many believed that sort of thing when they first saw 
Java (and there were cases supporting it).  Not that I'm knocking Java :-)

--Brian