:: Re: [DNG] OT: some ancient programm…
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Author: T.J. Duchene
Date:  
To: Didier Kryn
CC: dng@lists.dyne.org
Subject: Re: [DNG] OT: some ancient programming language history
On Sun, 2015-07-26 at 23:58 +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
>
>
>      Ada is not an acronym, it's after the first name of the first
> person who wrote programs, the daughter of Byron, the english poet.


Yes, I know.

>
>      Ada is used in many places where human life is at stake: eg.
> planes, missiles, Eurocontrol (the european air cirulation
> regulation),
> the driver-less metro in Paris. The initial version was Ada83. There
> have been some revisions since. Add95 was a major one and the last is

>
> Ada2012.


Yes. Allow me to rephrase. When I was taught Ada, it was assumed that
Ada was used primarily by the US Department of Defense, who had a hand
its creation.



>      The affectation operator is := instead of = in C, and the
> comparison are = (instead of ==) and /= instead of != . The bad
> choice
> of operators, together with other tricks is probably the main source
> of
> bugs in C programs.


I like the fact that Ada is very strict, because it forces new
programmers to do things right. On the other hand, that comes at the
cost of flexibility, which makes it useless for certain tasks.

Since C predates Ada by at least a decade, I don't think C is the
problem. I have never had a problem keeping "==", "=" or "!="
straight.

It's just my opinion, but there are at least a 2 dozen languages that
use the same syntax. Programmers who spent a large part of their
careers in low level or embedded have no problems with it that I can
tell. I think the only ones who DO have that problem are programmers
who learned things like Pascal or Ada first, along with the new kids
who can't seem to program "their way out of a paper bag" without
resorting to OOP.

Example? Have a good laugh. I know I did.


http://blog.pluralsight.com/give-me-those-old-time-programmers

“These younger engineers can write a lot of sloppy code, and it doesn’t
matter, but here, with very limited capacity, you have to be extremely
precise and have a real strategy.”