Re: Porting ADA source

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> Maybe I've just lived long enough to know as well that people like and 
> find useful certain approaches that are *not* 'elegant' because they are 
> expedient and that if you fight them on it, they go somewhere else. I 
> think that's one of the things that has hurt Ada over the years: We keep 
> telling programmers they shouldn't do something they want to do and then 
> wonder why they stay away in droves.

Pearls before swine, Marin, Pearls before swine.  It is a very tough 
choice, but I think we need _one_ computer language where the habit and 
the discourse is based on good engineering and software engineering 
practice.

The real problem that we keep running into is an attitude towards 
software that says it will be buggy, messy, and expensive to maintain, 
and that this is a fact, not a result of current software development 
practice.

I like it when the support group complains that they have insufficient 
data on mean time to repair bugs in Ada software.  And personally, I am 
not willing to give that up to increase the popularity of Ada.

-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too 
much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; 
on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them." 
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1821