Re: The Next Microsoft?

[Mark Atwood <mra@pobox.com>]

Ray Blaak <blaak@infomatch.com> writes:
> 
> Don't know about Coral-66, but Ada is very well designed. This myth about
> comitte-designed languages being somehow inferior is resoundingly false in
> Ada's case. It is precisely because many heads were looking at it that the
> details of the language all hang together.

Ada (at least the first version) was designed by one man, and then
went thru several rounds of being critiqued by the user community and
revised by a small committee headed by the language designer.

That is the right way to do it. In a slightly more free-form manner,
it's very similar to how workhorses like Perl, Python and C (*not* C++)
have been evolving.

I like Ada. If I have to use a Wirth-style language, Ada is the
language of choice.

And if I ever end up writting software that would KILL someone if it
goes wrong, I would professionally refuse to use any other language.
Writing weapons control, avionics, nuke control, or medical device
control software in any other langage is malfeasense, IMO.

-- 
Mark Atwood   | It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand, that
mra@pobox.com | just because they haven't thought of something, somebody else
              | might. <http://www.friesian.com/rifkin.htm>
http://www.pobox.com/~mra