Tony Hoare's Faliure
I remember reading ealier that one of the reasons the Ada language didnt become very popular is that the famous computer scientist Tony Hoare bashed it at one of his speaches. he said that exaceptions would be the downfall of computers. HA! i wonder what he feels like now with Java,.Net,etc.,etc. being so succesful with exceptions.
Why do you think he feels (or should feel) bad about this? Do you think the majority opinion is always right?
Oh, and Ada sucks.
Oh, and Ada sucks.
oh I know Ada sucks but the fact that he bashed exception handling is the main point. I know I would be a little upset if something I said in the past took know effect and was ignored in the futureā»
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Exception handling deserves to be bashed. It's a pain, it's slow, it doesn't look good or make sense in procedural programming, and Tony Hoare was right.
Note: you are not required to agree with me, nor are you required to convince me that your understanding of exception handling makes it a good thing.
Note: you are not required to agree with me, nor are you required to convince me that your understanding of exception handling makes it a good thing.
closed account (1yR4jE8b)
| Oh, and Ada sucks. |
Yes, the only language that was deemed good enough for the DoD sucks.
| I'm just saying that it is a commonly used method of handling errors now. |
Bandwagon fallacy? Bandwagon fallacy. (If you are implying this is a testament to him being wrong, which would be the logical conclusion to be drawn from your first post)
Well, he was wrong; he said exceptions wouldn't be popular, and yet they are. Of course that doesn't mean exceptions are a good thing, but no-one implied that they were.
i use my own execption handleing....c++'s way of handleing exceptions is weird and confuseing
Java's is even stranger. You've got checked and unchecked. At least you're guaranteed that only a Throwable will be thrown; in C++ you can throw ints and void pointers and even nothing at all.
| Yes, the only language that was deemed good enough for the DoD sucks. |
Well, at least that's my opinion.
I can understand why DoD selected this language. It has very readable syntax, for the most part you don't really need to know the language to understand the code. It is ultra-strong typed. It has runtime checks for arithmetic overflows, out-of-bound accesses, etc. This should all limit the number of bugs, and as a result improve safety.
But for me, its syntax is bad because of extreme verbosity. Mathematical notation is very succinct for a reason. Programming languages should be the same. I don't care if non-programmers can understand what's going on.
I don't like its ultra-strong typing, it's a pain in the ass, really. Lots and lots of code that does basically nothing. But probably I'm biased as I'm more into dynamic languages recently.
Runtime checks are nice, but how they compare to modern VM environments?
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I like languages where there's a good blend between easy to type quickly and easy to read quickly. I also prefer strongly typed languages, though, but like Abramus I don't think there should be runtime checks like that, at least not in release builds.
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