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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Ada was one of the first language I learned academically then I've never had the chance to use it again. It's not one of these fancy languages everyone want to use for their toy projects. However, I remember it was a pretty cool language. Better static checks than C, including a robust module system, clear semantic.

I'd like to give it a try again as an experienced programmer and see how the language has evolved over time.

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Did you got to the University of York? I did and I've never met anyone from another uni who learned Ada.

I think I was lucky to go and work for a company where I got to do both Ada (specifically SPARK) and Prolog in a professional capacity. It wasn't until I used them "for real" that I really appreciated the benefits of both when used for what they were designed for.

Sadly Ada has a bad rep, in part I think because it was mandated on so many terrible death-march defence projects. It seems to be having a minor renaissance, with people like Nvidia using Ada 2012 and SPARK to code their Risc-v security chip.

When I was in high school (the Swedish version of it) in the early 2000, the introduction to programming course used was Ada. When I then later entered university their introduction course to programming was C.

As a beginner language I recall it being quite nice compared to C.

No, French institution in the late 90s. At that time, common choices for beginner languages were C/C++, which weren't that great compared to Ada. Usual criticism was that Ada wasn't mainstream but I think it was a good pedagogical choice nonetheless (and it's not like we're learning only one programming language anyway). It taught me to think in terms of abstract data types without the added complexity of class-based languages.

Eventually, they switched to Java who became popular around that time.

I agree, I think it's a great pedagogical language for teaching a lot of concepts. Our algorithms and data structures course was taught in it. It was great for learning real-time systems as its built in concurrancy primitives are so good.

I went to Bradford, learnt Ada there because Andy Wellings, I think it was him, or the other guy, used to work there before moving to York.

I'm pretty sure I had Andy for the real time systems course in my third year. A good lecturer if I remember correctly.

Auburn University in the United States was big on Ada in the 90s but eventually Ada was mostly replaced by Java after 2000. One of the popular Ada IDEs, GRASP, was developed there.

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