mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Mike Feldman) (03/25/90)
Oh, well. I guess I spoke too soon and jinxed the end of the language wars. Look, ladies and gentlemen. PLEASE let's get technical again. I have worked with Ada since 1982. I live in the DC area; I teach in downtown Washington; many of my students are defense industry employees. The only _hype_ I ever heard about Ada was from a few people, not directly involved with its design or adoption, who saw that there was money to be made in Ada. This is the American way. The C folks (Kernighan and Ritchie included) hype C; Stroustrup hypes C++, too. Meyer hypes Eiffel, too. The Smalltalk crowd is not above a little evangelism either. Which of us can resist a little personal horn-blowing? Enough is enough, though. I hope this is a technical newsgroup. I am a teacher. Fifteen years in the computer science thing, 25 in computing. I have taught lots of Ada to lots of people. Also Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, PL/1, APL, and (gasp) C. Languages are tools. They are not religions. Let's grow up. Yes I write and teach Ada. I don't hype it, I don't dump on it. Neither does anyone else I know, and I know a _lot_ of Ada folks. I cannot blame DoD for taking a hopeful line about something they felt might get 'em better software for less bucks. I also can't really blame 'em for trying to make order out of the '70's chaos. Can you? Ada has strengths and weaknesses; let's exploit the strengths, let's try to fix the weaknesses or at least code around 'em. But for Heaven's sake, can we PLEASE stop the sniping? PLEASE? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Michael Feldman Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 +1-202-994-5253 mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------