Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

[duggar@mit.edu (Keith H Duggar)]

> That is not completely fair. It depends on the programmer as well.
> Having good documentation (including comments) as well as defined
> coding standards should make the code readable in any language,

Any language? No amount of commenting will make Brain F*** or
Whitespace readable. That is, the comments may be readable,
the code will not be. And that is an important distinction,
we are discussing (I think) the readability of CODE not the
readability of comments.

> perl, python. Understanding the syntax of the language helps in
> both cases. If I know the syntax, and language, I can read any
> language the same.

Again as counter examples take BF and Whitespace. These are
of course extreme examples but the valid point is that language
absolutely affects readability.

> True that python by nature is easy to read, but it is unfair pit
> it against some perl code itself. I have seen python code that is
> hard to understand at a glance and perl code that is easy to understand
> at a glance :)

I think understandability and readability are really quite
different. For example, I am able to read the following
English snip from your post

> All things being equal, Ada is nice to have, yet Perl is no better off
> than Python in many respects, unless you talk about OO features and
> such. Perl 6 should be interesting (even though it may be vaporware for
> a few more years, heh).

but I do not understand it all. In other words, I find
English highly readable yet many English "programs" such as
the one above make no sense to me whatever.

> Only reason I could see why the argument of reading the language of
> Python over Perl would be better is if there was no documentation and
> you had no idea how it worked before opening up your editors and

For me, an ideally readable language would be as self-documenting
as possible. Comments should just be gravy, summaries, or
notices of something tricky or difficult to understand (not read).

> Sure language syntax for readability is very nice to have, but it should
> not negate the need for proper documentation and standards :)

Hmm, it seems you are now contradicting your general
sentiment and your earlier specific statement that

> coding standards should make the code readable in any language,

Do you or do you not believe that syntax affects readability?