Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!male!grapevine!regenmeister!chrisp From: chrisp@regenmeister.EBay.Sun.COM (Chris Prael) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: bridge building (was Re: Documenting OO Systems) Message-ID: <1259@grapevine.EBay.Sun.COM> Date: 29 Apr 91 18:13:46 GMT References: Sender: news@grapevine.EBay.Sun.COM Distribution: na Lines: 25 From article , by jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter): > As for the quote itself, Plauger's point is that Ada is a language > designed from the ground up to support software engineering, whereas ^^^^^^^ Judging from the rest of this paragraph, you seem to mean 'force' rather than 'support'. > C most decidedly is not (I do hear they recently made it harder to If you can't engineer software well in C, you can't engineer software well period! > pass an arbitrary number of arguments of arbitrary type to a C function, > so I guess progress is being made....). One of the grossest conceptual errors of well intended designers is the idea that it is useful to constrain a programmer to do the right thing. While it is demonstrably useful to harness, bridle, and blinder a draft animal, it is just as obviously disfunctional to try to do this with programmers/engineers/designers. Tools that control the programmer can only do so by disabling. The result is not a technician forced to behave like an engineer but a hobbled technician. Chris Prael