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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c406e0c4a6eb74ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request Date: 4 Sep 2004 20:59:06 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 170.215.189.146 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1094356747 27480 127.0.0.1 (5 Sep 2004 03:59:07 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 03:59:07 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:3324 Date: 2004-09-04T20:59:06-07:00 List-Id: Georg Bauhaus wrote in message news:... > Kevin Cline 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.