robert@megaron.UUCP (03/27/86)
N.B. I mailed this to the original flamer, but it came back undeliverable. Not imagining anyone else would be interested in cluttering up the place with discussing it I felt that mail would was best. But since several have responded, I am resending my reply. Perhaps we can move this to net.flame or wherever? To those who flamed about a little lightheartedness mixed in with what was still a serious comment, could it be that you are hiding from what you really found offensive in that message. But I'll honor your concerns by addressing the things you mentioned first. - - start of my old mail message I am that person whose message you found offensive. There was no attempt to send anything out unsigned; I had thought the note was sent out with my signature appended. Contraceptives prevent conception, whether it is the conception of human life or the conception of ideas. With two years of personally using Ada and seeing a dozen other diligent and intelligent programmers striving to conceive and then being thwarted in their efforts by the language, I certainly stand by the poetic license that I took. And the word "screw" has no definition in my dictionary relating to fornication and in the manner it was used, it is a slang term meaning "I have little concern for what you may be trying to impose on me." If I were offended by the mere mention of sex, then you were the one mentioning it and I should be the one taking umbrage. What I really find utterly ammusing, is that fornication refers to sex between UNMARRIED couples; in seeing your reference to the word, I stop taking you seriously. What really concerns me is that you might have found my negative attitude toward the government offensive, ignored that in your letter, and then found something else to jump at. If that is the case, perhaps you may like my help in coming to grips with your problem? Note that this is mailed and not in the news, since it seems to have been something personal with you. Sincerely, Robert J. Drabek - - end of my old mail message Since this seems to have gotten bigger than I would have imagined from mature and intelligent people, I would like to add a couple more comments. First, I am not inexperienced in Ada. As a member of the team which has developed one of the largest running projects yet written in Ada, a product which has broken both the DEC and Data General compilers over and over, I probably have a better feeling for the language than most. Yes, I even like a lot of features, but little in the language is revolutionary (uh, oh, I hope the mention of revolution doesn't offend any radical right wingers); almost every- thing in the language has been tried or experimented with for the last thirty years. I teach a course in "Comparative Programming Languages" here and allocate portions of the semester trying to sincerely show the Ada's features and then let them draw their own conclusions. While their conclusions are the conclusions of innocents, they usually feel it is a verbose hodgepodge formed by a committee who wanted it all but didn't know what all was available. Nothing is inherently bad in the language, but as my original posting argued, with the turnover time to compile and link even a simple program being exceedingly long, programmers tend not to test as thoroughly, and more errors are passed through only to be uncovered when it is too late. And since the military is trying to have software written in this type of environment, and considering that they have the power, NOT THE RIGHT, to destroy the rest of us through their stupidity, then I have something to be concerned about and OFFENDED by. Since this is obviously getting off the technical track, I would like to draw the discussion to an end. If you have more to discuss on the subject, send me a note personally, and please don't, as someone else here said, get caught up in this and clutter up the net. Again, sincerely, Robert J. Drabek
cjl@iuvax.UUCP (04/08/86)
> First, I am not inexperienced in Ada. As a member of the > team which has developed one of the largest running projects yet > written in Ada, a product which has broken both the DEC and Data > General compilers over and over, I probably have a better feeling for > the language than most. > > last thirty years. I teach a course in "Comparative Programming > Languages" here and allocate portions of the semester trying to > sincerely show the Ada's features and then let them draw their > own conclusions. While their conclusions are the conclusions of > innocents, they usually feel it is a verbose hodgepodge formed by > a committee who wanted it all but didn't know what all was available. I am currently teaching "Programming Languages" in my school too. I shared Robert's experience that slow compiler tends to degrade the software coding. However I don't quite understand why Robert said that "Ada is a verbose hodgepodge formed by a committee who wanted it all but didn't know what all was available". I hope this topic can be furtherly explained. According to my experience of teaching, the feeling about Ada is quite different. When students learned Ada, it is just too difficult for them to go back to Pascal,C etc. While PL/I is generally criticized for being a monster created by a committee, Ada is quite different. Every feature is aimed to support certain software engineering principle. Without learning software engineering, it is too difficult to understand Ada. So I just dropped the traditional approach to teach programming languages by language comparism. Instead, the class is centering around the topic of software engineering. The other languages ( such as Modula-2 and C ) is only mentioned and compared when they support different approaches to solve the same problem. So at the end of class, students learned more about software engineering than the language comparism. But the tradeoff is paid off especially when students start to feel uncomfortable with other languages because they learned to design programs in a more structured and modularized manner but they find weak support in other languages. And I think that is a better approach for teaching P.L. in a limited amount of time. (The book I chose is Habermann's "Ada for experienced programmers" for senior students with Pascal as their mother tongues.) Ada is big. Big and slow compiler has certain effect on the program development. If present compilers remain slow or some features are proved to be too expensive, the definition of Ada Jr. may be necessary. So it would be beneficial if Robert can tell us why he thinks Ada is wrong IN DETAILS according to his experience. In addition detail and concrete discussion may be less offensive than quick and general conclusion. C.J.Lo Dept. of CIS, IUPUI UUCP : ...!iuvax!cjl ARPA : cjl@Indiana@CSNet-Relay