David Maynard writes:
One sees the same phenomenon with computer programming languages. For
decades, everyone has sought the holy grail of a computer language
that can be used for anything and is completely flexible and yet
somehow prevents the programmer from making coding or logic errors.
But such a language is impossible. The more flexible the language,
the easier it is to make mistakes with it; the harder it is to make
mistakes with a language, the harder it is to use it to program
anything useful.
A classic example of this misunderstanding is Ada, which was supposed
to make all programming safe. It did nothing of the kind, of course,
and it was so huge and complex and impractical that even its principle
proponent (the Department of Defense) formally waived the Ada
requirement systematically for just about every programming project it
undertook. I don't recall anyone else ever using Ada at all, although
I suppose someone did.
COBOL-85 was another joke, but I won't go into that.
