From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,243dc2fb696a49cd X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-01!sn-xit-06!sn-post-02!sn-post-01!supernews.com!news.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: Chris Humphries Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:21:02 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Message-ID: <4159572E.4080003@unixfu.net> User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20040918) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <11b4d.3849$d5.30042@newsb.telia.net> <415813FE.9090803@unixfu.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4321 Date: 2004-09-28T08:21:02-04:00 List-Id: Kevin Cline wrote: > Chris Humphries wrote in message news:<415813FE.9090803@unixfu.net>... > >>Kevin Cline wrote: >> >>>Again, the original question was "Why isn't Ada more popular?" >>> >>>The answer I am giving is that most programmers don't have such an >>>overriding concern for safety that they are willing to write twice as >>>much code to get the additional safety. >>> >> >>(whoa, what a thread this has become!) >> >>Thanks, and good answer. Since then asking that question, I have >>learned a lot more about Ada. John Barnes' book, "Programming in >>Ada 96, 2nd Edition" helped tremendously. A very good book. It is >>now nice to understand just what Ada _is_, and not just another >>programming language, but more an attempting at progressing software >>engineering. >> >>I also think I understand why Ada is not more popular. Though I >>am very thankful for open source, and feel very strongly about about >>it, something bad has grown out of it: bad programmers and programs. > > > Bad programmers didn't come from open source. There have always been > bad programmers, and there always will be. Just as it is with music > and writing and film and art, 90% of all programming sucks. > I didn't mean that, I apologize for the communication error. I meant that the general open source development community and environment doesn't generally have a software development process other than run and see if it does what you think, then repeat. Though the *Unit classes are spreading out and becoming more popular, though you can usually tell that they have more formal development standards in place, such as the Mono (http://mono-project.com which is backed by Novell) and Zope (http://zope.org which is backed by the Zope Corporation http://zope.com) projects. I did not mean to imply that all open source is bad, sure there are bad projects everywhere (closed and open source). > >>Most open source projects seem to have no formal software development >>process... >>Many young/inexperienced programmers do not even see why this is >>important, as their code works, and generally they are done with it >>then and there. > > > This is also true for a surprising number of old and experienced > programmers. > > >>In the real world, and in my job, most of the time >>is spend updating code. Good times are when I get to design something >>new, most the time is spent doing grunt work. > > > This situation is common, but not inevitable. On a good project, > design is a continuous process. Unfortunately, most programs reach > the point where any change is so risky that developers spend all their > time trying to figure out how to squeeze in a new feature without > breaking the existing features.