From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5cb36983754f64da X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-02-07 18:29:08 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn13feed!worldnet.att.net!bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: David Starner Subject: Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language) User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity. (Debian GNU/Linux)) Message-Id: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <20040206174017.7E84F4C4114@lovelace.ada-france.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:29:05 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.72.182.226 X-Complaints-To: abuse@worldnet.att.net X-Trace: bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 1076207345 12.72.182.226 (Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:29:05 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:29:05 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:5328 Date: 2004-02-08T02:29:05+00:00 List-Id: On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:00:01 +0100, Ludovic Brenta wrote: > I was more concerned with large-scale, > real-world programming, where Ada shines but is being ignored by too > many people. Ah, so that wasn't in the real world. Thanks for clarifying that. > I was only trying to explain to myself why. I stand by > my claim that no language can make programming easy. But a language > help you find, or avoid, bugs. But that's not the goal of programming. The goal of programming is to produce programs that get the job done. There are certainly languages that remove the concern about memory usage, and allow you to easily handle strings and databases and GUIs, and these languages certainly do make it easier to solve certain classes of programs. If they're slower and take more memory, no one cares. If they have a few bugs, well, they get worked around. > I would ask him, "would you trust your own life to your program"? He would tell you of course, and ask you how you could trust your life to a program automatically produced by a compiler you know to be buggy. I might point out that his program doesn't require that you trust your life to it. Not everything is life and death, and a lot of things require writing the program quickly or having the program run quickly over absolute correctness. > Because I want to control exactly how much memory my program uses, So you're anal. There are very few programs that push my computer, with 300 MB of RAM to swap. Worrying about 10% memory usage on the rest in exchange for occasional crashes is not a good tradeoff. > You referred to embedded software for > space-bound devices, this is one area where these questions are really > important. Yes, but you missed the point. That's one class of software, and there's probably not a million lines of code written a year for that class; probably not one percent of the code written for PCs with 1 GB of memory that won't use over a few MB in practice. > There are some languages that force these > upon you and won't justify this cost. But you aren't the one being asked to justify it; you are telling other programmers that it's unjustified. Perhaps the inefficiency is justified to them. > Pascal > was quite good at teaching, and as a "master" it had quite a lot of > apprentices. Java has a lot of apprentices, too. Pascal has something to do with the number of people who refused to look at Ada, in the way that it forced everyone into this tiny box, without modules or generics or bit twiddling and all in one file.