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AdaCore University

university.adacore.com

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I am not sure why, but this week I happened along Ada again (cannot remember why) and also stumbled upon AdaCore.

Can someone explain to me, since I am in the uninitiated, why no one has shown real interest in Ada, with its complicated type system and functional paradigm abilities, while Haskell has been lauded long after its creation.

I am sure its origin in a DoD contest for the best military equipment language does not help, but anyone in the know can tell me why Ada is not interesting to the FP/type-system nerds while Haskell is the it child? I know Haskell is great but how is Ada laying around unnoticed outside of some govt contractors?

It's an old language, not sure how many people still use it, how easy it is to use and whether any modern libraries exist for it at all (say json parsing, mongodb drivers, http server..). Furthermore, not sure how it interops with C and whether it has a good debugger.

True. But Haskell is not necessarily young (of course I understand we both know Ada is still much older). There is the GNAT project, which is the GNU compiler for Ada. Rosetta Wiki showed examples of C Interop/FFI that seemed reasonable logical to me, and there are a few HTTP server projects, like AWS [0] and another Github trending repo (as far as Ada is concerned) and Yolk.

Granted I know little and do not use these things. Anyone else know?

[0] http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/

[1] https://github.com/ThomasLocke/yolk

Ada was first standardized in 1983. It's one of the youngest mainstream languages. It's target market isn't the technobabble du jour, so you probably wouldn't make it your first choice for your Pinterest clone startup. However, if you're interested in building industrial strength applications (thinks like the targeting computer in a cruse missle), with lots of programmers, that has an application lifespan of years or decades instead of months, it's very well supported by libraries at all levels. It does interface with C, and does have good debuggers.

> I am not sure why, but this week I happened along Ada again (cannot remember why) and also stumbled upon AdaCore.

It can be because AdaCore was the main sponsor of the ERTS² Congress in Toulouse, France last week. ERTS² (Embedded Real Time Software and Systems)is one of the most important congress in Europe about embedded.

Ada have the image of an old language but with the last revision in 2012, it's a modern tool [2].

[1] http://www.erts2014.org/

[2] http://www.ada2012.org/

The university that I attended used Ada as it's introduction programming language. It's very verbose and, up until recently, has historically suffered from poor documentation.

The best ways to learn Ada, up until online documentation became better in the past few years, was to use heavy poorly written Textbooks, where it's competitors already in aerospace and security could be learned by stumbling around.

Haskell is sported by the functional programming community, which are already zealots.

There aren't many 'strongly-typed' programming language zealots, and most people run with the argument that concise is equivalent to readable.

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