Re: Concurrency

[Philippe LAVAL]

Martin J. Maiers said:
>Java is absolutely not a web-oriented language (althout it
>is small, like all good languages should be).

You are right. Small languages are nice for programming-in-the-small. 
However, beyond a threshold of, say, 2,000-4,000 lines of code 
(depending on the complexity of the application), you may begin to 
experience design problems. You then understand that you should have 
adhered to software engineering principles, and followed a design 
methodology.

This is distinct from knowing the syntax of a language. However, if the
programming language was crafted to enforce software engineering
principles, your task is easier. Ada is just that: large enough to offer a
range of possibilities from which you can choose the ones reflecting
best the logic of the application -- for example concurrent tasks --,
and so strictly-typed that inconsistencies relatively to the specifications 
are rejected by the compiler. Of course nothing prevents you to declare 
a variable of type Integer with no range constraints; this is only very bad 
programming style, something you will have to pay sooner or later in a 
large project.

I do not know how big is the core Swarm library. What I know is that in
a large project, in addition to design problems, if there are more than
2 programmers you are likely to also encounter software management 
problems. They will not be solved by a language choice, but by the use 
of a development methodology, together with management skills.

Forget my silly remark about Java. Java is not, as several persons
objected, restricted to web applications. I was inclined to thing so
because I previously browsed a few books on Java, which were extatic on
its possibilities to write applets. Applets are typical of programming-
in-the-small applications. I didn't feel compelling to learn Java
because J-code can be automatically generated by some Ada compilers, and 
I am already familiar with Ada (a several-year investment).

Java is certainly safer than C++; it is surely a good language for 
programming-in-the-small. I will stop here, I do not want to engage in a 
classical language war in this thread. There are newsgroups for that.



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Philippe Laval
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B.P. 28 - 06234 Villefranche-sur-Mer CEDEX (France)
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