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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I tend to like Ada, but it is a tiring language to read with the all caps. Also, it 'feels' like it has a gatekeeper group and really doesn't come up in any mobile conversation. I still believe someone will do something akin to a syntax substitution and come up with a well liked language.

Also, modern Fortran is not that bad of a language much like the modern parts of C++.

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The community is definitely not helping, or has not helped. It seems to be improving but I've seen a lot of negative responses to novices that read like some of the things I saw in the 00s when trying to get into Common Lisp. Some individuals are willing to push past this, for others it's a deal breaker.

The community is becoming more open (AdaCore has been very helpful here), I think, but you still have a fair amount of vocal gatekeepers that are going to continue to keep people out (deliberately or not).

If it's any consolation, the Common Lisp community nowadays is very welcoming!

It is, and I should have said that. I pushed past the issues in the larger community when I started because I had a good local community (grad school, prof was pushing it). About the same time the general community behavior was improving, and now it's a very welcoming language community. You still occasionally get curmudgeons but they aren't the loudest voices.

The tradition of all caps keywords (just a convention, not required as others have noted) was common in most languages in the era before most editors had syntax highlighting. It wasn't meant to be "tiring" but rather the opposite, to make reading code easier. Of course modern syntax highlighting makes the convention obsolete.

> [...] tiring with the all caps.

I guess there is more to like then, since the keywords are case insensitive. The OP doesn’t even use all caps.

Odd, that was what I was told by our Ada teacher, and the book has all caps.

It is indeed a common misconceptions, but here is the official Ada 83 Language Reference Manual on the subject: http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-02-09.html...

> Reserved words differing only in the use of corresponding upper and lower case letters are considered as the same (see 2.3).

Interestingly, the manual itself doesn't even use upper case:

> For readability of this manual, the reserved words appear in lower case boldface.

So even the Ada standard recognizes the upper case is less readable and undesired.

Case insensitivity also applies to identifiers (variable names, type names etc.) (sec 2.3) and that is a definitely an archaic feature, but the GNAT compiler has the helpful -gnatya style check which enforces the Pascal_Case style: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.6.4/gnat_ugn_unw/Style-...

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Another common misconception is that function/procedure names (designators) must appear after the `end`. That is optional:

> If a designator appears at the end of a subprogram body, it must repeat the designator of the subprogram specification. http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-06-03.html...

Some people prefer all caps for keywords, just like they do nowadays on SQL code. But the language is case insensitive, you can choose otherwise.

All caps haven't been a part of the language since Ada83, go check the follow up spec, Ada95. Maybe you're thinking of Niklaus Wirth's languages, the Modula's and Oberon?

Wirthian languages seemed to keep the 6bit symbol encoding of the original Pascal, where the symbols and keywords ended up case-nonpreserving. Was that changed at any point with Modula or Oberon? I never have seen any code with all caps.

Oberon is case-sensitive and all keywords are all caps. I was curious to see it because I like Object Pascal/Delphi, that was the most distracting part of the language coming from Delphi standards.

That approach used to be chosen by many languages, because it is the best alternative to syntax highlighting when none is available.

> Oberon is case-sensitive and all keywords are all caps. I was curious to see it because I like Object Pascal/Delphi, that was the most distracting part of the language coming from Delphi standards.

Yeah, it's horrible to see and worse to type. I took Oberon-2's grammar and changed it to a more Ada like one for a project I'm working on.

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