Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

On 2014-07-10 03:42, Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> Don't try to promote Ada by criticising other languages. It just doesn't work.

Another thing to be careful about is to contrast Ada with *modern* C++
and modern C++ practice. Saying that Ada is better than C++ was in 1995
isn't going to impress C++ programmers in the trenches today.

Just as a simple example, the business of accidentally using an
assignment operator in a conditional statement is really a non-issue.

// C/C++
if (x = y) {
  // Oops! Used an assignment operator instead of a relational
}

Every C++ compiler worth using produces a warning for this, typically in
the default mode. I write a fair amount of C++ and I can't remember when
I last did this where the error slipped into the final program. It's a
straw man issue as far as I'm concerned.

To write a document that properly contrasts two languages the author
needs to be very fluent in both languages. Such people are

a) Relatively rare.
b) Typically too busy to write such documents.
c) Generally like both languages too much to feel motivated to advocate
for one over the other.

Unfortunately a lot of advocacy is done by people who are expert in one
language (the one they like) but relatively uninformed about the other
(the one they dislike). It's human nature!

Peter