On Aug 3, 8:27 am, Paul Rubin <no.em...@nospam.invalid> wrote: <snip>... > > Certain folks in the functional-programming community consider OO to be > a 1980's or 1990's approach that didn't work out, and that what it was > really trying to supply was polymorphism. C++ programs these days > apparently tend to use template-based generics rather than objects and > inheritance for that purpose. > > I've never programmed in Ada but I'm intrigued by these articles: > > http://adahome.com/Ammo/cpp2ada.html > http://www.adaic.org/whyada/ada-vs-c/cada_art.html > > I have the impression that Ada has an undeservedly bad rap because of > its early implementations and its origins in military bureaucracy. I'd > certainly consider it as an alternative to C or C++ if I had to write a > big program in a traditional procedural language.
I used to work for defence contractors - Ada (IMO :-)) is the very best OO language for real-time and embedded systems. It scales fantastically well to large, multi-platform jobs as well. If I had my way we would use it where I work now (biomedical field) but that isn't an option - too many folk are brought up on a steady diet of C/C++ and therefore don't know any better, plus there is a dearth of Ada compilers for the CPU's that we use here (all embedded work). I have used fortran, C, C++, some Java, Ada (and Python :-)), if I had my choice for the type of programming I do here at work, it would definitely go to Ada by a country mile. Having said that though, I won't replace Python with it on my desktop for the type of stuff I do around the fringes of my job (test scripts etc) and my personal programming :-) But for anyone who wants to expand their horizons, learning Ada would be an excellent choice (although like any learning activity, unless you have a concrete goal in mind you will probably just waste your time :-)). It is not an easy language to just pick up and run with because the strong type-checking FORCES you to think about and design your program very carefully from the very beginning - something that many programmers find an abhorrence for :-) But I always used to tell people - by the time I got a program to compile then I figured 99% of the bugs were already discovered! Try that with C/C++ or almost any other language you care to name :-) Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list