[cpp-threads] meta-question about Ada

[jimmaureenrogers at att.net]

--
Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado
U.S.A.

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei at metalanguage.com>
> I still am just as biased. Also I don't buy the argument that "many 
> people in academia seem to look at the military background of Ada and 
> reject the language on that basis." I am in no position to provide 
> useful insights or data on the issue, but the military does fund a ton 
> of research, and everybody's ok with that. Heck, the Net came from the 
> military and everybody loves it :o). My own research is in speech 
> recognition of Arabic language. The military interest is obvious, let 
> alone that Arabic is an interesting language to build models for.
> 
> To add insult to injury, the word around the grad student lounge is that 
> Ada "is much like Object Pascal, only more boring". Of course there's a 
> lot of ignorant bashing in such a statement, but it comes from pretty 
> knowledgeable people, and it sure isn't motivating.

We are all knowledgeable people in some areas and more or less 
ignorant in others. The term "boring" needs some definition. Is that
term one born of experience, or is it merely the collective wisdom of
people who have heard opinions from other people?

Ada is not most people's first choice for implementing web-based
applications. That has not prevented the creation of a web server
written in Ada.

Ada is not most people's first choice for graphics manipulation,
but that did not stop my team from creating an artificial horizon
display using Ada.

Sometimes rigidly standardized languages are declared boring because
they are not open to ad-hoc changes from grad students.

How many of those same grad students find software engineering boring?
Very few of the recent graduates I have met in the past 10 years have
any interest in software as an engineering field. They are more 
interested in concepts such as eXtreme Programming.

Over 10 years ago I was punished at a division of Hewlett-Packard for
suggesting Ada as a possible solution to the problem of improving
overall programmer productivity. The reason was simple. That particular
division had a very rigidly enforced technical hierarchy. Once placed
in the hierarchy you had virtually no opportunity to improve your
annual ranking in the R&D lab. The common wisdom in that lab, which
used C, was that the difference between the best programmer and the
worst programmer in the lab was a factor of 10 in quality and
productivity. Ada threatened to change that to a factor of 3.
Even worse, the younger programmers were likely to pick up a new
language faster, effectively inverting the technical hierarchy.

One more problem with Ada was that managers could read your code and
get a pretty good idea what you were doing. This eliminated the
mystical techno-priest status of the top ranked programmers.

The older programmers not only did not like Ada, they wanted anybody
mentioning the word to be fired.

All those top-ranked programmers were pretty knowledgeable people.
That did not make their opinions correct. Their opinions were based
upon fear, ignorance, and prejudice.

Everybody is welcome to their own opinion. As another very 
knowledgeable person I knew from Hewlett-Packard often said,
in the absence of data, all opinions are equally valid.

As engineers and scientists we should try as much as possible to
support our opinions with facts and data. 

It is not possible for each of us to be experts in every language.
There is not enough time in our lives for that. Given that limitation,
we should try to inform our opinions about languages we do not know
using the judgements of people who are expert in those langauges.

--
Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado
U.S.A.