Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Harald Korneliussen" <vintermann@gmail.com> writes:

> skill, experience, effort, and attention to detail than is required for
> some other programming languages." So if you use C, that means you are
> skilled, experienced and attentive, by some people's logic. It's a
> macho thing, "If you can't handle the power, don't use it!".
>
> Klingon programmers if there ever were any.

That, of course is a general problem in IT: Public
criticism/discussion of "popular" (read hyped) paradigms or tools is
hardly possible, because that seems to imply that the critic is just
not able to use it ("What you can't program safely in C -- I can!"). I
might go farther and note that in teams/projects criticism is often
disliked: What is called a 'can-do' attitude in cheap management
literature is considered to be important. ("According to my analysis,
we can not write this piece of software in 2 months, since ..." --
"What, are you so incompetent? Your colleague / competitor says he can
do it. So'll give it to him").

So in my opinion you only point out a sub-aspect of a quite larger
problem.

> It's of course a symptom of lack of professionalism: construction
> workers who are proud of what they do wear their helmets.

Quite right. But in computer science (esp. software engineering) the
hard data is often quite missing, so the participants in these
discussions replace it by belief. Whereas nobody expects a proud
construction worker to wear amulets and nobody seriously suggests it,
because the majority agrees that helmets protect and amulets probably
not, the situation is different for development paradigms, processes
and tools. And usually there is no hard data available. So even those
which act wrong from your point of view can continue believing that
they are doing the right thing. 

There is also the aspect of marketing which tends to further distort
reality (or whatever goes for it in IT).

Regards -- Markus