🚀 go-pugleaf

i hate to get a reputation for leaping all over william thomas wolfe's
postings (and in fact i actually agreed with most of what he said this
time), but....

In article <5740@hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) writes:

	...
       Why?  Ada provides a very high level of support for abstract
       data types, so no problems there.  There is a large and growing
       set of Ada packages which support specific domains (the classic
       math libraries are the basis for this increasingly important
       reuseability strategy), which extend reuseability into
       reuseable domain-specific knowledge; they certainly work rather
       effectively.  What basis is there for claiming otherwise?

there really isn't yet a basis for claiming that there are known
problems that need stronger techniques, BUT there are stronger
techniques that have been developed that allow much more powerful
forms of genericity than that provided in ada (ml is a good early
example).  these improved forms can actually subsume inheritance and
can provide a much simpler interface to a generic package.


       When we consider that Ada was designed in the late 70's (it
       took from 1980 to 1983 to get Ada through the ISO), its
       continuously accelerating popularity almost a decade later is
       quite remarkable, and a strong affirmation of the vision and
       skill of its designers.

now wait a minute.

don't you think that there is a possibility that the interest in ada
is mostly market driven?  further, isn't there a distinct probability
the reason that people are only now beginning to seriously talk about
ada is that in spite of the heavy market drive (i.e. dod money),
reasonable ada compilers have only recently (last 3 years) become
available on machines that people are interested in using?  what does
it mean if a language is so complex that it takes the resources of the
dod nearly 10 years to force the development of even moderate quality
compilers for common development platforms?

compare this development with the concurrent development of simpler
languages that include the important features without including the
bureaucratic drek.  examples of such languages include modula [23],
c++, ml, common lisp and others.  compare also the effort required.
does 2 or 3 orders of magnitude simpler implementation mean something?