blackje%sungod.tcpip@GE-CRD.ARPA (08/25/87)
Received: by sungod.steinmetz (3.2/1.1x Steinmetz) id AA01992; Tue, 25 Aug 87 10:16:30 EDT Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 10:16:30 EDT From: emmett black <blackje@sungod> Posted-Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 10:16:30 EDT Message-Id: <8708251416.AA01992@sungod.steinmetz> To: info-ada@ada20.isi.edu Subject: Looms and Ada (SOH: Start of Haranque) partially in response to jru at etn-rad... Note that Ada is a proper name: uppercase "A", lowercase "da"... and Babbage did the "difference engine" (aka Babbage's engine) which Ada attempted to program to (of all things) handicap horse races.... (therefore my contention that she was not the first "programmer" -- but rather the first "hacker") The language is named in her honor because of the aformentioned allegation that she was the worlds first "programmer". and that LOOM was the "Jaquard" (spelling?) loom which did use punched cards, predated the Countess, and with which she had no connection. One wonders about the who the FIRST programmer really was, since that loom came before the diffence engine... Perhaps the language should be called "Jaquard" ? ------ And remember that bad programmers can STILL write FORTRASH using Ada syntactic constructions and Ada semantics... the real trick is to pick up the software engineering techniques and to master a different way of thinking about the problem (see previous discussion on "AdaThink")... and there are quite a few commercial establishments which are noticing that they can save LOTS of MONEY by finding a way to not spend that money on REDOing and REFIXING software that they have developed... and Ada, and particularly the software engineering practices which Ada attempts to embody, helps them to trim the trailing edge of the lifecycle considerably. In Europe, there is a lot of commercial Ada work; the Nokia group sells a lot of applications software that would have typically been cobol domain stuff.... but it's in Ada... and they are making money. There are problems with Ada, of course. But don't worry so much about the LANGUAGE; worry about learning how to approach problems differently... worry about learning to deal with problems at a higher level of abstraction... worry about communicating abstract concepts to other people... worry about generalizing your solutions so you can use them again and again... don't worry about semicolons; that's what computers are for... (EOT: End of Tirade) --Emmett BlackJE@GE-CRD.ARPA Disclaimer: no one listens to me anyway.