Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org> wrote in message news:<ptmdnX73DcCT9bTcRVn-tQ@gbronline.com>...
> fabio de francesco wrote:
> 
> > What does demonstrate that the time it takes to read and understand
> > lines of code are related to the lenght of the code itself? (
> 
> Simple disproof would be to compare a typical APL program
> with an Ada program that does the same thing.

But an experienced APL programmer would undoubtedly find the shorter
APL program easier to read.

You can not judge the readability of a program by testing whether a
naive programmer can understand the program line by line.  Would you
consider a book on multivariate calculus to be poorly written because
it was not immediately understandable by the average high-school
graduate?  Concise mathematical notation makes it possible to reason
about mathematical objects at a high level.
So, instead of "limit(e->0) [f(x + e) - f(e)] / e", we write "f'(x)"

Similarly, writing applications concisely at a high level of
abstraction makes it easier for programmers experienced in the domain
to modify the application to meet new requirements.  The Boost::spirit
parser library for C++ is an excellent example of the power of C++
templates that is unmatched by Ada generics.

Relatively few programmers would be capable of writing the SPIRIT
parser library, but when that's what you need, Ada just won't get you
there.