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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

This is a head scratcher... The most modern educational innovation is being applied for the least modern language. I guess it makes sense. There are lots of in person training programs for Ruby and Python, but not for Cobol or Ada.

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Ada is quite a long way from COBOL. Having just completed its latest revision about a year and a half ago, Ada is very much cutting edge. Ada 2012 is hardly a maintenance revision like you may find for COBOL; it adds tons of new stuff like contracts and substantial improvements to concurrency and SMP support. Ada 2012 was too long after it's previous revision, Ada 2005, which was standardized in 2007, and was quite more substantial than even 2012.

Static typing, message passing concurrency, dynamic dispatch, modules, object orientation, generics. These things are so ancient, why would anyone want to use a language like that anymore? About the only thing it doesn't get a check mark for is functional programming. And most of those features I listed were actually well considered and deliberated on before being added into Ada so it's not just a kluge like tacking more features onto C.

"Least modern"? You know Ada gets updates to its standard, right?

> This is a head scratcher... The most modern educational innovation is being applied for the least modern language.

How is it the least modern language? The oldest? The least relevant? Please be specific.

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