Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!dee
From: dee@linus.UUCP (David E. Emery)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Newest programming skill
Message-ID: <25001@linus.UUCP>
Date: 22 Feb 88 16:52:02 GMT
References: <1105@percival.UUCP>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 37
In-reply-to: gary@percival.UUCP's message of 19 Feb 88 18:39:29 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.1 of Sun Aug  2 1987 on faron (berkeley-unix)


gary@percival.uucp writes:

<first quoting from an Alsys ad>
>"It will develop that most elusive skill: the Ada programming intuition to
>guess right."

>But since when is an abilty to "guess right" part of a good
>programmers skills?  I don't know about you, but I don't want to trust
>my survival (no flames; I support SDI strongly!), or my taxes, or the
>local traffic light to "guesses", right or wrong!

The issue here is, I suspect, not making the 'software' guess, but
rather developing programmer intuition on how to use the language.
Much of programming is a creative process, and, for any
language/system/paradigm, there is a learning process on how to best
use the features of the language.  C shows this a lot; there is a
large set of C 'tricks' on how to use the language. 

Ada, due to its size and its greater power, offers the programmer a
much bigger bag of tricks (Ada generics alone offer incredible
potential).  I think (at least I hope) this is what Alsys meant in the
ad.  If so, they worded it poorly.  My experience has been that a
great number of my Ada 'tricks' are those that depend on the compiler
to check errors.  In other words, I do a lot more 'defensive
programming' in Ada, and let the compiler tell me when I screw up.
One example:  In Ada a case statement MUST cover all alternatives.  To
make sure I've trapped all parts of the case statement, I won't use an
'others' clause, and if I missed a case, the compiler will complain.
Then, I'll add the 'others' clause, to protect myself.  

No, this isn't any great thing, but there are a zillion different
tricks in Ada, some of which are useful at a given point.  A
programmer needs to develop the intuition to determine which tricks
are usable.

			dave emery
			emery@mitre-bedford.arpa