Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice for a beginner to programming?

[noone@example.com]

On 24 Dec 2002 06:01:00 -0800, billtate@usermail.com (W D Tate) wrote:
> How much money are you prepared to flush down the toilet on
>such activities as debugging or trying to decipher something conceived
>by a kid named Garth?
>
>If that's appealing to you then by all means take the C/C++ route, 

In my experience, there are a lot of libraries available for C/C++
that the only counterpart for Ada (often only a binding to the C/C++
library) was, um, "conceived by a kid named Garth".

>the
>historical evidence points to a good probability that a state of
>entropy will have firmly set in by the 2nd or 3rd generation of your
>product.  

Does historical evidence really make much distinction between
languages here? Ada makes "you are not supposed to understand this"
parts less likely, but it won't eliminate them, nor will it make well
designed, named and commented functions and variables. (Ada wouldn't
have stopped the original "you are not supposed to understand this"
comment; according to the writings of one of Unix's creators, the only
thing that would have stopped that would have been actually fully
understanding what they were doing there.)