RE: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 01:39 PM 12/13/2001 -0500, Christopher Barber wrote:
> > All three of the reasons you give for why Ada was more
> > expensive (no one used it by choice, no one wrote
> > libraries for it, and no one wrote compilers for it) are
> > just the symptoms of real hackers not liking it.
>
>Only if you believe that "real hackers" are the only people who make
>business decisions regarding language choice.

Or that they make the right decisions regarding language choice. I know a 
lot of people who would quit a job rather than program in COBOL or Fortran, 
even though for many tasks those languages are by far the most appropriate 
for the task. (A scary number of accounting and payroll programs are 
written in C. Using floats or doubles to hold money)

"Real hackers" generally ought not be allowed to touch production code. 
Production code generally ought not have any sort of hacking involved in it 
at all.

> > It may have shown up in the DoD's books as "language too
> > expensive" but the root cause was "language sucked."
>
>I don't know the language well enough to say that, but it still does have
>its adherents so it can't be that bad.

It's actually rather good. Ada is dead-on the right language (of the ones 
we have available) for many purposes. Its worst flaw is that it's a 
language to do engineering work in. It isn't a toy language, a play 
language, an art language, or a research language. That's one of the big 
reasons many programmers hate it. It's also why it's the right language for 
things that must work.

I'd feel far happier knowing the plane I was flying in had its control 
systems written in Ada rather than, say, C.


					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk