Re: Hoare's gripes about Ada (was Re: Ada and C++ ...)

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In article <1993Aug19.120801.18134@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>, blaak@csri.toronto
.edu (Raymond Blaak) writes:
*Someone, somewhere writes:

*>>One of the supposed beauties of Ada is that it cannot ever change.  The Ada 
*>>which Hoare claimed was unfit for any use with serious consequences is the
*>>same Ada which is out there now, to the best of my understanding.

*Regardless of what Hoare thinks about Ada now, what were his original
*complaints about it?

That the language itself was far too large for starters...  Hoare correctly
noted that the big success stories of recent years, C and Pascal, included
in the base language only those things which figured to be used in every
program which ever got written using them, or very nearly only those, and
that everything else and the kitchen sink, rather than being part of the
language, got put into libraries to be linked in by the user who needed
them, only when he needed them.  C doesn't even include (in the language)
any notion of IO and, while this may have appeared extreme at one time,
it appears far-sighted now.  There is simply no reason why a program which
uses MS-Windows should also contain all of the code for stdio.h, X Windows,
MS-DOS screen IO (conio.h), etc. etc., when it doesn't use them.

Hoare noted that the language was far too complex, and that users were
going to spend more time working around Ada than solving their own 
problems;  in theory, most programmers are being paid to do the later and
not the former.

And there were a number of other things.  It's not as if he gave a long
speech on another topic and then, at the end, said "Gee!  this Ada thing
looks like a bad idea..."

Were that the case, I could easily imagine his being convinced somehow or other
to change his mind.  In fact, however, the entire speech was on the topic
of Ada, it was a hell of a long speech, and there was a buildup which took
into account a number of predecessor languages which failed for the same
reasons which Ada has failed for, and this included most notably PL/1.

In the speech, Hoare very clearly laid out what should be guiding principals
in the design of programming languages, and Ada was a kind of an ultimate
opposite example to everything which Hoare figured was right.

So, assuming the people aren't simply lying in claiming that he has since
come around to being an Ada admirer, your guess is as good as mine, but
I am simply not able to believe that he simply was convinced that he had
been wrong.  That would imply that everything he had ever learned or
believed about computer science prior to 1980 had been 100% in error,
and that he'd have been better off selling used cars for a living prior
to that time, and only starting work in computer science AT that time.

I figure they probably tied him to a tree and forced him to listen to
rapp music until he succumbed, but that's ONLY a conjecture.



-- 
Ted Holden      Ada is to computer science
HTE             As rapp is to music