Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

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Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 18:42:29 -0500

"Dan McLeran" <danmcleran@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e71d8d6.0409030656.eef6dcf@posting.google.com...
> > Why not? I still use the circa 1985 MS-DOS editor and batch files to
> > program; the Janus/Ada compiler provides everything else that I need
(mostly
> > good program creating support).
>
> You must have a high pain-tolerance.

Actually, I have less tolerance for IDEs that try to 'help' by reorganizing
my carefully structured program text. Or by changing identifiers to match
some capitalization "standard", even if they don't make sense: "Text_Io",
anyone?

In any case, my MS-DOS editor is multi-window, does auto-indenting, and
allows all commands to be operated on blocks (even rectangles) of text. This
last capability is invaluable, because it is often the case that you want to
replace something is a section of text, not the whole file, and there often
are enough mods that OKing each one isn't sane.

As far as creating the program goes, any decent Ada compiler will do that
with a single command (gnatmake for GNAT, make for Janus/Ada, and there are
similar commands in IBM/Rational Ada and in ObjectAda). Nothing complicated
about it, even if the program is split into shared libraries and the like.

Let me assure you, if a GUI really would help me be more productive, I'd be
using it. But short of building one myself (which I may do someday, the one
we provide with Janus/Ada is garbage), I don't expect to see it.

> > all the GUI will do there is make it more likely to
> > lose the settings (because they're in some obscure settings file in the
> > registry or some remote directory, rather than in a batch file that gets
> > backed up daily with the source code...)
>
> I would hope a high-quality IDE would not.

An IDE is in a lose-lose situation here. If it clutters up the users space
with all kinds of files with obscure contents, then people (rightly) will
complain about the clutter. If it hides the files, they are likely to not
get backed up. The "quality" of the IDE isn't going to fix this.

The original design of Janus/Ada had no extra files (other than object code)
at all. You could run 'make' anywhere, and it would work (presuming all of
the source was visible directly or on the search path). We went away from
that because people wanted better tools than the search path for structuring
than the search path, but I'm very unconvinced that anything could be
better. (Note that GNAT started with a system very similar to the original
Janus/Ada in this regard.)

> > That said, I understand the many modern programmers are looking for GUIs
to
> > hold their hands, and certainly we support that.
>
> Maybe not hold my hand but at least help speed up tedious tasks.

And that is my point. There are almost no tedious tasks in creating programs
from the command line in Janus/Ada, or in GNAT. So a GUI simply doesn't buy
much. The only thing I find tedious is waiting for the compiler to finish -
and no GUI is going to help with that!

...
> > Of course, that's just part of a general dumping-down of programming.
And
> > that's what managers want: they want any idiot to be able to build
software,
> > so they can hire minimum wage people (or outsource) to do the job. But
> > you're never going to get anything well-designed and maintainable that
way.
>
> I assume you made a typo above and mean dumbing-down?

Yes, it was a typo.

> I'm not sure I agree that tool vendors who make tools to make programming
> easier are attempting to dumb-down programmers. As far as managers go,
that may
> be the case.

Tools vendors write tools that they can sell, which means appealing to
managers. Any help to actual programmers is purely coincidental. (RRS never
did this, which is a significant reason that Janus/Ada wasn't very
successful.)

                    Randy.

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