Re: What is wrong with Ada?

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

Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de> writes:

> On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 16:32 +0200, Markus E Leypold wrote:
>> Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> writes:
>
>> > Another way to put it, let me ask : What's wrong with
>> > developers ? Why do they like unsafe languages ? 
>> I think I already answered that.
>
>> > Why do they like fighting a language all the time?
>> Well -- difficult to say:...
>
>> > Why do they like unreadable code?
>> > Why do they like to play with a debugger ? 
>> 
>> Good question....
>
>> THIS post is
>> absolute nonsense and not worthy to yourself.
>
> Erh, `already answered', `difficult to say', `good question'
> and then `post is nonsense'??? 

Well, creative quoting get's you (almost) anywhere. 

> Seems like another opportunity
> of addressing a few important observations of an alleged 
> programmer sample has been missed.
>
> Suppose I try to frame Pascal's questions with notions of programming
> extracted from the Windows/VB/Excel/ASP world, or from the
> PHP/Perl/apache world and mix them with the (stereo-)typical
> Ada or C++ surroundings, what will I be comparing?
>
> A good starting point might be to see what programming in a
> (stereo-)typical shop means. A construed tentative grouping
> is
> - "scripting shops" (Perl, PHP, Python, ASP, ...)
> - "forms shops" (VB, Delphi, C#, ...)
> - "accounting shops" (Cobol, APL, Java, ...)
> - "observation shops" (C, Fortran, Ada, ...)
> - "media shops" (don't know :-/ ...)
> and
> - "vehicle and missile control shops" (C, C++, Ada, ...)
>
> And if we compare the mean programmer skill in the respective
> shops listed above, can we reasonably expect to find means
> that differ significantly? Or can we at least expect to find
> per-shop-quantiles that show some structure in the distribution of
> skill that is different in each shop type?
>
> I can follow Pascal's questions as an expression of a valid observation,
> maybe even an observation with sufficient statistical reliability. On
> rare occasions of reading some computing history literature, I find that
> younger programmers like clever solutions more than programmers who have
> grown older.  Ada culture puts cleverness at a different level of
> abstraction, other kinds of harmful low level cleverness are delegated
> to the C culture. Knowing clever {}-culture solutions still saves you
> the trouble of adding business critical obfuscation.

And your point is? 

George -- As much as I like a good flame war or an intelligent
conversation (there is even a certain amount of overlap) -- this time
I'll not fall for your attempt :-).

I think, that c.l.a. is probably the wrong place to start any
insightful study into QA or programming culture which should be based
on at least some data. You talk as if there is just some data around
te corner ("differ significantly", "per-shop-quantiles", "distribution
of skill", "shop type"), but it's all a lot of handwaving at the end
of the day ("can we reasonably expect", "I can follow ... expression
of a valid observation") and we end up with "culture" arguments which
a malleable without end almost by definition. 

What you sketch encompasses multiple (perhaps rather interesting)
studies, which might also end totally inconclusive. But there is not
even a solid methodology yet how to conclude such studies (and no, I
don't think McKinsey, Anderson or any university has such methodology
in THIS area, since empirical studies in software engineering are
quite rare and still in their infancy -- if you compare SE with
psychology (empirical studies on not so hard subjects) or natural
science (empirical studies on lots of hard subjects). 

You are welcome to try to conduct those studies (and if you need
infrastructure or some organizational umbrella I'll gladly help out,
either to find or to found one :-). But mind, a brainstrom does not a
study make. Nor do anecdotes on c.l.a.

Regards -- Markus