Re: is Ada dying?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <nierp9.sm1.ln@320025674319.dialin.t-online.de>, Michael Bode says...
>Maybe this excerpt from the Jargon File explains why hackers are not
>mainly coding in Ada:
>(having programmed in C[++] some time I personally think is a good
>reason to give Ada a try)

The Jargon file is maintained by a single rather opinionated person, who happens
to hold quite a few rather outlandish opinions. Politics aside (after the WTC
bombings he tried to seriously argue that everyone on airplanes should carry
firearms...), he holds some rather "unusual" opinions about software
engineering. Generally, anything that isn't C or Perl is crap, as far as he's
concerned.

He's actually a really smart guy, and can reach some very good and valid
conclusions, when he starts off from postulates that everyone can agree with.
But when he doesn't, you can find yourself off into some non-Euclidian logic
universe where 1 = 0. The problem is that its tough to judge whether he came a
reasonable postulates with any of his opinions in the Jargon file. So generally
you are much better off ignoring that file altogether and relying on FOLDOC
(http://www.foldoc.org ). Its entry for Ada includes the following:

Ada is often criticised, especially for its size and complexity, and this is
attributed to its having been designed by committee. In fact, both Ada 83 and
Ada 95 were designed by small design teams to be internally consistent and
tightly integrated. By contrast, two possible competitors, Fortran 90 and C++
have both become products designed by large and disparate volunteer committees.

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T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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