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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

I love Ada, unfortunately it’s real world use seems to be relegated to old legacy code. I’d like to use it a little more on the side, but I also need to keep my priorities focused on realism, which sadly means ignoring Ada and learning something like C++ which seems unapproachable from any angle.

Ada also seems to have a weirdly negative rep in many circles it seems. I recall looking around for an Ada compiler for a moderately popular platform and came across and old thread where people didn’t give any options but instead just joking about how the OP was interested in such a terrible language. Maybe it’s the Pascal/Algol type syntax?

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> people didn’t give any options but instead just joking about how the OP was interested in such a terrible language.

I think the attitude is mostly a historical artifact and momentum. The language was soundly rejected in the 80s and 90s by many people in favor of C, for numerous reasons. Some valid, others invalid. It's carried a reputation since then (much like the author's take on Fortran, many quick takes here on PHP and Perl) that reduces the potential for adoption today even though the language is actually rather pleasant (IMHO, and also now, may not have been 20 years ago) to work with.

But other languages are better advocated for, and have (mostly) better tooling these days. Alire is helping on the package manager front, but it's still pretty new. When people think "safety" in software they tend to jump straight to Rust and Haskell, mentally, even though Ada also fits within that conceptual space.

Bingo. I never heard anything good about Ada until about the time that both C++ and Java were firmly entrenched.

Jack Ganssle has advocated for Ada for a long time. http://www.ganssle.com/rants/ada.htm

Lack of a free compiler with permit to use commercially (gnu linker exception), was a problem during a significant phase of the language.

GNAT debuted in 1995, 25 years ago. Some 12 years after the 1983 standard.

Yes, but Gnat did not have a gpl linker exception, so for the free version your compiled file would also be gpld. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada/c/cPsKwgiuO-w Only when gnat fsf was released end of 2001 this was not a problem anymore, except for the confusion and perceived uncertainty (also using it on windows means mingw, not everybody likes that) For the fsf release: https://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.html#Hi...

You can say this is still 20 years ago, but you have to count from the other side. If you have two solutions to a problem the earlier one wins more (except if the later ones is order of magnitude better on a metric that counts). Yes, rust is also late to the party, but support of Mozilla is a big advantage.

From my experience, it still gets a lot of use in aerospace and defence companies. Outside of those industries I can't think of people even mentioning it really, but again probably biases abound.

Skimming my local jobs list(SE England) I see new listings from both Airbus and BAE Systems looking for Ada developers in the past week.

Yeah but I wonder how much of that is new development or code from the 80s-80s they’re wanting to port to C or C++

Again this personal experience only, but one of the projects I'm linked to is a greenfields Ada project.

However, you'd be correct to say there are an awful lot of multi-decade projects in both the companies I mentioned(and the aerospace/defence in general). For example, last year my main project was work stemming from a design that began in 1997.

Apply to nVidia or Toyota then, they have new projects.

>I love Ada, unfortunately it’s real world use seems to be relegated to old legacy code. I’d like to use it a little more on the side, but I also need to keep my priorities focused on realism, which sadly means ignoring Ada and learning something like C++ which seems unapproachable from any angle.

Oh, my github must be ancient then!

> Ada also seems to have a weirdly negative rep in many circles it seems. I recall looking around for an Ada compiler for a moderately popular platform and came across and old thread where people didn’t give any options but instead just joking about how the OP was interested in such a terrible language. Maybe it’s the Pascal/Algol type syntax?

That stems from the hatred from the people working at the DoD at the time who'd never even seen the language.

Heh, I must say way, impressive GitHub. You the original author of the OSDev wiki’s barebones Ada tutorial?

Off topic, but have you ever heard of CHILL? It’s a language from the ITU designed for telephone switches (like Erlang) but is supposedly very similar to older Ada standards.

> Heh, I must say way, impressive GitHub. You the original author of the OSDev wiki’s barebones Ada tutorial?

Thanks. Yes, you can tell because it doesn't show as a fork on my gh and it should show on the wiki who wrote it.

> Off topic, but have you ever heard of CHILL? It’s a language from the ITU designed for telephone switches (like Erlang) but is supposedly very similar to older Ada standards.

Yeah, heard of it, that is all though.

I have heard of it, and was tempted to grab a copy of the spec. -- The context in which I heard it, language design, Ada was put forth as the only language designed for both maintainability and correctness, someone responded that CHILL was another, but the only other they knew of.

https://psc.informatik.uni-jena.de/publ/1999-T-REC-Z.200-199...

https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Z.20...

Both those links are the same, btw.

I can see why it's no longer used, with all those modes! But another language with ranges. Also has module inheritance.

>Both those links are the same, btw.

Yes, two different locations for freely getting the spec.

> I can see why it's no longer used, with all those modes! But another language with ranges. Also has module inheritance.

IIRC, "mode" used to mean (in some cases, historically, in CS) the equivalent of what we now call a "type" — I seem to recall Algol using the terminology, but may be misremembering.

I've never programmed Ada, but I've read pl/(pg)sql are based off it, and those have pretty wide use in their niche. So its principals may live on for quite some time in those other languages.

NVidia is writing new greenfield code with Ada/SPARK.

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