Re: Heartbleed

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2014-04-18, Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> wrote:
> On 04/18/2014 10:30 AM, J-P. Rosen wrote:
>> <rant>
>> The cause of Ada not being popular is that it has been designed to force
>> people to THINK and do things cleanly. People prefer wild hacking and
>> long debugging sessions to sitting back in one's chair and analyzing the
>> problem.
>> </rant>
>
> Yes. Or as I like to put it, Ada is a software-engineering language, and only 2% 
> (in my experience) of developers are software engineers. The remaining 98% are 
> not going to like Ada; they like hack-away languages like C.
>

I agree with both of you, but the fact remains those same people are
writing the critical/common libraries used in a wide range of software
and hardware products.

So how about a language which doesn't have all the software engineering
requirements Ada does, but still comes with some type safety, has
a level of functionality comparable to C, uses a syntax which makes
it far less likely for people to make silly syntax related mistakes and
runs on far more platforms than Ada compilers do ?

You probably won't be able to use this language for creating enormous
applications, but that isn't what it would be designed for and such a
language should be much more "hackable" than Ada (while still bringing
some Ada style benefits to the table).

Now all we need is someone with the energy and time to design and promote
this language. :-) (Not me I'm afraid; I have a full time job. :-))

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world