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=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!ottix-news.ottix.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!backlog3.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 08:56:10 -0500 Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 09:56:06 -0400 From: Peter Chapin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum References: <72b1318a-2eb6-4129-af9b-5bcfbb329c5b@googlegroups.com> <3889b2f4-b7c4-4fb0-9f37-6fc56400b1d7@googlegroups.com> <8OednWik9bvZACfORVn_vwA@giganews.com> <13bda335-c7a0-47e0-9127-d4c3e80751d9@googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: <13bda335-c7a0-47e0-9127-d4c3e80751d9@googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-E4UIB9vvbZRYlboHnzGDkmG+X1l1JLTbucc2LVMVAZALOPOuwyQi6QMzYKBfG9BXcnsxt2Emx9NMTXR!oD820OLXMFD3HS68lueGeQurj6WJGQh+bkkPBMS79LCpF1zLKM3Ki3ojY25VlzI= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2835 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:187490 Date: 2014-07-10T09:56:06-04:00 List-Id: 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