Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Brad Moore <brad.moore@shaw.ca>]

On 2014-07-07 7:14 AM, Peter Chapin wrote:
z> On 2014-07-06 18:15, Brad Moore wrote:
>
>> I think another path to Ada popularity would be to raise awareness of
>> the differences.
>>
>> There was a paper entitled "C++? A Critique of C++ and Programming
>> Language Trends of the 1990s." by Ian Joyner written way back in 1996,
>> available in numerous places on the web, including here:
>>
>> http://archive.adaic.com/intro/ada-vs-c/cppcv3.pdf
>>
>> The paper is written by someone who obviously has a strong knowledge of
>> Eiffel and C++, but raised some good criticisms which I think mostly
>> still would apply today.
>
> FWIW, I think Joyner's document is terrible. In fact I wrote a somewhat
> long "Critique of Critique of C++" that I'd be willing to email to
> anyone who might be interested. My opinion is that Joyner does not
> understand C++ particularly well at all and that, in fact, he has
> several "fringe" ideas about what constitutes good programming language
> design. He work makes him appear to be a quack.
>
> While I agree that C++ has issues, quoting Joyner's document just
> weakens one's arguments.
>
> Peter
>

I agree that that there are a lot of problems with his document, besides 
being very dated. I don't agree with a number of his ideas, and I think 
he has too much of an Eiffel bias. I also think some of this criticism 
is about issues that aren't that significant, and at other times he 
comes off too harsh against C++, but he raises some good points as well. 
For example, the issue with having to commit to the presence or absence 
of the virtual keyword on methods in a base class, causing problems via 
maintenance of a class hierarchy is one that strikes me a significant 
problem. That being said, it is not a problem that I've typically run 
into in practice. There are plenty of other problems that I do run into 
with C++, where I think; this wouldn't have happened if it were written 
in Ada.

But I think it would be very difficult to produce a comprehensive, 
unbiased, multi-language critique. It would be nice if such a document 
existed, (and maybe it does), but I think if the goal is to produce a 
document that promotes the use of Ada, then I think maybe a better 
approach would be to focus on Ada specifically, and highlight the things 
that Ada got right, rather than try to point out problems in other 
languages. I am sure there are numerous documents of this nature out 
there, but I suspect many of them are out of date, and would benefit 
from being updated. The problem with such documents is that there is the 
possibility that they "preach to the choir". They don't really promote 
the use of Ada, if Ada programmers are the only ones who read them.

They are useful though for those who do program in other languages who 
are looking to explore other possibilities.

Brad