Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

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

Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message news:<chaeg8$32k$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>...
> Kevin Cline <kevin.cline@gmail.com> wrote:
>  
> : No doubt that Ada has fabulous support for integer-indexed arrays.  
> 
> (and name-indexed arrays :-)
> 
> :  In 25 years of
> : programming I have seen about 17,000 implementations of linear search
> : and 5,000 implementations of sorted insertion, almost all of which
> : could and should have been eliminated by using an associative
> : container of some sort.
> 
> OK
> 
> : By providing extensive facilities for array-based programming while
> : ignoring all other data structures, Ada leads most programmers to do
> : the wrong thing, and frustrates most of the remainder.
> 
> Well, ignoring... the next Ada will have vectors, sets, tables, lists,
> and then some, such that more (queues, ...) can be built on top of them,
> by default, and standardised.
> AFAIKT the specifications are influenced by experience with 
> libraries in at least Ada and STL. So if programmers have been
> using arrays for things that arent't arrays, there must be
> a problem other than availability of data structure libraries?
> A general lack of awareness of how ADTs work?

One might expect that graduates from a four-year degree program in
computer science would at least understand the characteristics of
basic data structures, but sadly that seems not to be the case.  I've
interviewed many, and relatively few were able to even tell me the
run-time complexity of code they had just written.

Generally I've found that programmers use the features that were
covered in class or described in their chosen textbook or manual.  And
most programmers will read only one or two books on any given
language.

Textbooks and manuals rarely cover anything that is not part of the
core language.  I would expect that most C++ texts to at least
superficially describe the STL, but very few will even mention
multi-threaded programming.  I would expect Ada texts to cover
threading, but would be surprised to see anything more than a mention
of CHARLES or other data structure libraries.