Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

From: Nick Landsberg (hukolau_at_att.net)
Date: 02/08/04 

Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:54:55 GMT

David Starner wrote:

> On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 14:00:35 +0100, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>
>
>>Of course, this is a lie, because programming is inherently
>>difficult and no language can make it easy.
>
>
> That's exactly what the assembly language programmers said about the
> first Fortran compiler, and it's equally wrong now. Sure, there are cases
> where you need to run DSP code and coordinate with the home base thirty
> million miles away using one space-hardened 386, and that's hard. Then
> there's the cases where you need two lines of shell to simplify moving
> files around, and that's something assembly or Fortran or Ada or Java
> would make much more complex then it is.
>
>
>>(like e.g. memory management. If some Java
>>"guru" reads this, ask yourself this one question: how many threads
>>does your program have, and please justify the existence of each
>>thread).
>
>
> In the Jargon file, there's a story of a man who bummed every cycle out of
> a poker program, even the initialization code, who spurned assembly
> language because it was too inefficient. How would you explain your choice
> of programming language to him? Who cares if there's a couple extra
> threads running? You make a big deal about languages that protect you
> against buffer overflows, why not use a language that protects you against
> memory leaks?

"Who cares it there's an extra couple of threads running?" you ask.
I do! I work on systems which are required to process thousands
of requests per second. Unnecessary threads (just because the language
makes it easy to create them), waste precious CPU cycles. (But that's
OT in c.l.c, I think).

If your last statement refers to Java protecting you against memory
leaks, then you have a surprise in store for you.
If it protects you against memory leaks why is there a need for
a garbage collector in the first place?
I have found many situations where the garbage collector did
not clear unused memory. The garbage collector is just as
buggy as any other code. (This is also OT in the c.l.c group.
and I don't want to subsribe to c.l.java :)

>
>
>>The "zen master" languages are Pascal, Modula,
>>Oberon, and, master of masters, Ada.
>
>
> Pascal is hardly usable, unless you use one of a dozen proprietary
> extensions. That's hardly "zen master".
> 

-- 
Ñ
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so 
ingenious" - A. Bloch

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