Re: Heartbleed

["Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>]

On 4/11/2014 11:58 PM, Shark8 wrote:

> Yeah -- that's rather disgusting. I blame the prevalence of c-style
> languages as well as universities 'targeting' them (that is to say
> ignoring non-C-style languages).
>

It is all about libraries, not the language itself.

At school, Matlab is used for everything in engineering.
Everyone knows that Matlab as a language is not robust
and not safe by any means (it has no typing and no
protection against making simple and silly errors that
can take long time to find)

But it is the main tool used to write all types of
engineering and scientific tools in engineering.
Python also is weakly typed.  R is also the same. Same
for Javascript, etc... Mathematica the same, no
typing, but lots of useful packages and commands build
into it.

Many languages used today are weakly typed, not safe,
and one can easily produce programs full of bugs
using them.

They are used, simply because they come with ready to
use and large number of useful packages to do all sorts
of things, and many allow one to easily make plots and
visualization on the fly.

C++ these days is used by many for numerical computation,
even more than Fortran, though I think Ada is a much
better language for this due to its strong typing
and subtype system, but Ada has almost no useful numerical
libraries ready to use. Nothing close to what C++ has
these days. In Ada, one has to write many things from
scratch.

Until this is fixed in Ada, it would make no difference how
safe and robust Ada as a language is. You can make Ada
100% more safe than it is today, and it will still not be
used and adopted by the masses. It is like having a very
powerful and safe car, but with no gas.  Not very useful.

What Ada needs is CRAN like package collection site, as
with R or CTAN package collection site as with Latex. A
place one can go to find and use Ada standard packages.
That would help. But this requires large community
and lots of resources to do. Ada also need much larger
standard libraries build into it.

my 2 cents on the subject.

--Nasser