Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada??

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

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Mike Silva wrote:
> I think so too.  Of course the article only mentions Java and C++.  Big
> surprise there.

Everything technical about SW development favors the use of well 
designed languages such as Ada by SW engineers. Everything economic 
favors the current system where the construction workers (coders) design 
the bridges (SW) and choose the materials (languages) to build them 
with. Adding concurrency to the mix won't change that, though it will 
probably reduce quality even further.

Ada is a language for SW engineers; C and its offspring are languages 
for coders. Since we allow coders to choose languages, it's not 
surprising that they choose coders' languages.

Even when Ada is used for concurrent systems, Ada's concurrency features 
are often not used. While technical reasons are often given for such 
decisions, they rarely are true. Generally, the real reasons are the 
designers' lack of understanding of concurrency, replacing it with 
something more familiar.

Why don't we allow construction workers to design bridges and choose the 
materials? Because when they fail, we lose enormous lawsuits, and that 
more than offsets the savings obtained. Because when they fail, people 
die in ways that attract the attention of regulators. When the same is 
true of SW, perhaps we will see a distinction between SW engineers and 
coders, and Ada will become more prevalent.

In the meantime, my experience is that only about 2% of developers are 
SW engineers, so I'm glad Ada isn't popular. If Ada were popular, it 
would mean it was badly designed.

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