Bools and explicitness [was Re: PyWart: The problem with "print"]

[Russ P.]

On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 9:59:07 AM UTC-7, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 2:15 AM, Russ P. wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 1:59:01 AM UTC-7, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> 
> >> I want to launch this rocket with an expensive satellite on top.  I know
> 
> >>
> 
> >> it's safe as the code is written in ADA.  Whoops :(
> 
> >
> 
> >
> 
> > So Python would have been a better choice? Yeah, right. If you know anything about that rocket mishap, you should know that Ada was not the source of the problem. Ada won't keep airplane wings from breaking either, by the way. It's not magic.
> 
> 
> 
> Frankly, I don't think the language much matters. It's all down to the
> 
> skill of the programmers and testers. Ada wasn't the source of the
> 
> problem unless Ada has a bug in it... which is going to be true of
> 
> pretty much any language. Maybe Python would be a better choice, maybe
> 
> not; but let me tell you this, if the choice of language means the
> 
> difference between testable in three months and testable code in three
> 
> years, I'm going for the former.
> 
> 
> 
> ChrisA

I'm not an Ada guy, but Ada advocates claim that it reduces development time by half in the long run compared to C and C++ due to reduced debugging time and simpler maintenance. Then again, I think Java people make a similar claim. As for Python, my experience with it is that, as your application grows, you start getting confused about what the argument types are or are supposed to be. That requires the developer to keep much more of the design in his head, and that undesirable. Of course, you can always put the argument types in comments, but that won't be verified by the compiler.