Re: Promoting Ada via facebook/google+ ....

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:14:40 +0200, Bill Findlay  
<yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> a écrit:
> It surprises me that soemone who appreciates Ada also subscribes to the  
> cult
> of 'concision', which is so antithetical to the view of programming as a
> human activity. 8-)
>

Clearly identified foundations, formal definitions and specification,  
trustability of what you see/read, provision for formal analysis, and so  
on, may indeed make some people be both interested in Ada in one hand, and  
Haskell, SML (and others) in an other. Ada is not only about verbosity  
(which would not be that much interesting alone), it's also about  
trustability and provision for analysis. Don't be fooled by the  
conciseness of functional language like Haskell and SML. Formal proofs  
languages typically are concise in some way (and that's even what make  
them usable, if they were not, there would simply be unpracticable), just  
to say concise is not necessarily a synonym of unsafe or untrustable.  
There are time or task where verbosity is welcome, there are time and task  
where it would prevents things from being done. Conciseness is mainly with  
implicit types, which does not mean “untyped” nor “dynamically typed”,  
even the opposite (and even more than simple types with formal proofs).  
Where you have other way to do thing than verbosity, you do with these  
other ways. Because some things are provable or are mainly manipulated by  
mathematicians, there is SML and Haskel, and because some things would  
need years to be proven, there is Ada and it's verbosity which helps  
reliability its own way.

Not surprisingly, some people live in both worlds.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University