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Comment by acadien | Hacker News Reader

Are any of those languages even remotely similar after 25 years? For example, C++11 is practically a different language from C++<98.

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One counter argument is that you're still building on the same foundation.

Likewise C++ isn't going to be as concise as Haskell ever.

So the paper still hold some truth if not mostly valid.

The conclusion mentioned some interesting truisms about prototyping, team-size-induced-complexity and "long bugs" vs "short bugs". Good stuff. If the PDF was not a collection of images of the text, i'd have copy-pasted that bit here. :)

Haskell changed way more than C++. I don't think Ada changed a lot.

Still, they are so different from each other that I don't think all that change makes much of a difference.

Ada has had 3 major revisions since 1994. It's changed at least as much as C++.

Not to mention the changes to the SPARK subset of Ada for doing proofs on parts of your code have improved a lot.

I don't think you can compare the changes between Ada 83/95/2005/2012 to what has happened to C++. The Ada language seems much more stable and backwards compatible to me, and given it's nature, it makes sense to avoid introducing major changes. However, I'm not an Ada expert so correct me if I'm wrong.

Oh, I bet you can given it's been done in detail more than once. Here's a recent one:

http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded/c11-and-ada-2012-re...

The paper is dated 94 which is the same year as the original implementation as the C++ STL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library#Impl...). So it's a fair bet they didn't have access to that. I would think the entire difficulty of the exercise would change with that.

If I were to jump into a random c++ project, which version would I expect to find?

If it was written before 1998 I expect you'd find a version of C++ that existed before 1998 :)

If it was written today, I don't know that's a really good question. I think its a mistake to ignore the advances that 2011 and 2014 bring to the table though.

I do not think that someone wants to use C++11/14 to make app prototype. There are a lot more languages now which in my opinion are better suited to prototyping than languages mentioned in article. Most of people will use Python, JS or some other scripting language.

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