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

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

> Not to make this a flame war, but it seems that you have never
> been in a professional software engineering environment that
> involved work on your part other than grunt code writing.

Hmm, are you sure you aren't projecting your own shortcomings
onto me? Juding from this post and your others you come across
to me as someone who just recently read a book about software
engineering and now considers himself an authority.

> Even
> someone that has been doing grunt code work for a long project
> would understand what I am saying.

If you are refering to the snip I quoted in saying I didn't
understand, I said so because the ENGLISH was vague and
imprecise.

If you are referring to your point of "documentation is very
important" I have never disputed that and few if any here
would. What I said was that it was off topic in the sense
that the thread was talking about READABILITY of CODE not
understandbility nor the readability of comments and
documentation.

Finally, judging from another of your posts where you wrote

> 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. 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.

you, if anyone, seem to fall squarely in the inexperienced
(with respect to software design) grunt hacker group. More
importantly, ad hominem has no place here so I would suggest
that you reframe from it. Especially if you are trying to
avoid flame. Better to focus on specific concrete responses.

> Hopefully it is was just communication errors on my part. :)

I believe it was. Also, I believe you strayed a little from
the issue of readability of CODE into the issue of
documentation and design.

> documents and software code go hand in hand. Something
> that a college student probably has not experienced or
> learned yet.

*smirks* You should try college sometime, you might actually
learn some software engineering. And don't let the email
fool you, I haven't been a "college" student in many years.
And again, ad hominem has no useful place here. That is
something that many people never learn in a lifetime.

> > Again as counter examples take BF and Whitespace. These are
> > of course extreme examples but the valid point is that language
> > absolutely affects readability.
> > 
> 
> Well, lets exclude those languages as I, for one, do not know of
> any real production use of them or anyone that actually uses them
> outside of fun and tinkering. I was talking about languages you
> come across in reality, such as Perl, Python, C, C++.

Then you should not exaggerate by saying "all". Further,
they were simply counter examples to the extreme point
that "syntax does not affect readability" which you seemed
to be arguing.

> I understand the point of readability, but you should understand
> that any good software engineering process should include documentation,
> use cases, and other things that are related to the software and
> is not actual software code. The coding part is generally the easy
> part if the documentation and design are done properly.

I'm glad you understand the point of readability. And, I
never claimed that documentation etc are unimportant. That
is somewhat obvious to me and a point that I for one have
never denied.

> The code
> should just be an implementation or "reality" of the documentation.

The "should just be" is obviously not true. Machine language
is "just an implementation" yet there are obvious reasons
we don't write in it. What code "should be" depends on who
you ask. Many argue it should serve as documentation,
specification, implementation, a design language, etc to
varying degrees. The extreme view that it "should just be
implementation" is just that, extreme. 

> When I say "documentation", I mean documentation that exists
> outside the code itself.

Isn't this thread about the readability of CODE not
not the readability of documentation?

> > Do you or do you not believe that syntax affects readability?
> 
> Of course I do, and thankful for it.

Ok, then case closed. Syntax can affect readbility. And as
I stated previously I found the Python syntax the most
readable for this particular example.