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Comment by superbcarrot | Hacker News Reader

I have so many languages on the "give it a chance" list that I don't know where to start.

If it helps make up your mind at all, I was much the same the way until I ended up trying Ada. After a night bashing my head against the compiler... well now every time I see a new language pop up I quickly check a few of the features I've become too attached to from Ada and usually* leave in disappointment.

You can decide for yourself if this is an endorsement or a warning. Or both.

*Exceptions obviously exist for very different niches or paradigms.

Yeah, ranges and modular types for me, without them data modelling is hindered severely.

Ranges are a pretty big part of it for me, but what really gets me is the ease of creating useful new types. Having to destructure a new type to use it, or create a bunch of pass-through functions kinda ruins the point. I haven't seen any language really have a strong cultural focus on types like Ada does, and I think the ease of creating and using new types is the cause.

I think the best I've actually seen in this regard is actually Haxe, with some decent macros for automatically getting pass-through functions. It doesn't even make you list them all out explicitly (as I've seen others do), IIRC.

Most languages just go with machine size "types" and no strict typing on those. I've not seen any other languages do what Ada does. I've got my project to do so though.

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