Comment by jmilkbal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmilkbal | Hacker News Reader

These articles give the worst impression of Ada possible. It's not the it's a specialized language for the military, but a language created to cleanup the DoD's software nightmare of the 70s, which is not unlike the software nightmares of today. It just happens that they had a pretty good grasp, even at that time, of what helps make good software easier to write, large software projects easier to manage and maintain, and strong ideas about how much a language should intervene if the programmer is doing things that look pretty dumb.

Ada has a neat OO system (not like the Javas or C++s), built-in state-of-the-art tasking (since 1983!), ranged types (one of the things I can hardly bare to live without), but also simple things like switches that aren't useless and just a general appreciation for what a discrete type can allow you to do. It has generics, too, though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages. Have you seen that new Java 8 date time stuff? It's playing catch up to Ada. Ada's numerics are, hands down, the best facilities of any mainstream language.

Most importantly, it's probably already available for your Linux distribution because it's a part of the GNU Compiler Collection, which means that it's on the commercial OS you've settled for, as well.

An out of print book that I always recommend to those who are interested in playing with Ada is John English's "The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming". Enjoy.

http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/docs/craft/html/c...

I discovered Ada 2012 last year, and ended up doing a chunky writeup on it: http://cowlark.com/2014-04-27-ada/index.html

It's a seriously nice language --- it feels like a mature, well-thought-out C++ without a lot of the craziness and ancient edge cases. There are moments of sheer brilliance: the pointer scoping semantics mean that it's actually _syntactically invalid_ to leak pointers from an inner stack frame to an outer one. Its tasking and concurrency support is amazingly good. Having proper nested functions are amazing. The type system, while no Haskell, is easily good enough to say things like 'bounded array of tagged unions with length not known at compile time', with both compile and run-time error detection. And all this produces code that performs on a par with a modern C++ compiler!

Here's a multithreaded Mandelbrot renderer what I wrote: http://ideone.com/a1ky4l Note that each thread is a scoped object nested inside a function, communicating with each other via strongly typed and named messages --- startup and shutdown synchronisation happens automatically...

That's not to say there aren't warts; the OO system is pretty painful, with some annoying hidden requirements (e.g. you have to define a class' methods adjacent to the class structure itself, otherwise the compiler gets confused; if this is a requirement there should be explicit syntax for it). Having case insensitive identifiers is a complete failure. Exceptions are just plain clunky. There are a number of syntactic weirdnesses where the language got expanded beyond the original syntax' ability to cope. But the big omission is that there's no garbage collector, even though the language was obviously designed to have one. It would be so, so much nicer to write real code in if it had one.

Ada really deserves to be better known than it is.

There is at least one error in your "About Ada" section. The language was not designed by the Department of Defense, though it did meet specifications laid out by DoD called the Steelman. The language was designed by Jean Ichbiah and his team at CII Honeywell-Bull for a competition held by the High-Order Language Working Group, a group within the DoD. Four languages were submitted: Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, of which Green won and became Ada.

http://www.adahome.com/History/Steelman/steeltab.htm http://www.adahome.com/History/Steelman/intro.htm

I did the first couple years of my undergrad (starting 1990) in Ada. I liked the generics, although the lack of inheritance was peculiar for an OO language. As a Pascal programmer in high school, Ada was pleasant and familiar, but I quickly lost interest when I discovered Eiffel. Eiffel felt like what Ada should have been from the beginning.

I've not written a single line of either post-graduation.

Sadly both suffered from enterprise prices by the compiler vendors.

Although Ada seems to be quite well in high integrity systems. At least that is my perception from the, now regular presence, at FOSDEM and European safety conferences.

    ...although the lack of inheritance was peculiar for an OO language

I almost see that as a feature. ;)

Ada had OO from Ada 95, though it doesn't look anything like the OO in most mainstream languages of today. In Ada 95, tagged types were introduced which were based on Ada's powerful record types and Ada 2005 introduced interfaces in a style similar to Java. Java and Ada have both taken plenty from each other over the years.

Edited because I was misleading about the introduction of OO.

I have only tried Ada for a few toy programs, but given the reputation it has with some people, I was pleasantly surprised.

Ranged types are awesome. Like I said, I did not use Ada a lot, but I have on a few occasions when programming in other languages missed them.

Also, the diagnostics the GNU Ada compiler gave me were a lot more helpful than anything a C++ or C compiler ever gave me.

During a presentation, I tried to show a ranged type implementation in Java. To put it mildly: it's a mess.

"It's not the it's a specialized language for the military, but a language created to cleanup the DoD's software nightmare of the 70s, which is not unlike the software nightmares of today."

The nightmares aren't like each other, they are the same nightmare, just with the spooge scraped into slightly different piles.

Further, a language won't clean it up; that's going to take something seriously different. In fact, I suspect the spooge is irreducable past a certain point. I believe it is the nature of the problems.

That being said, Ada is a significant improvement over many others, in many cases for the reasons you describe.

"though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages"

Uh, what?

> "though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages"

> Uh, what?

Sarcasm, presumably; cf. Golang.

T'was programming language satire at it's finest, in my opinion. :)

A non-free resource that I found very helpful in learning Ada was "Ada for Software Engineers" (http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781848823136). Although it covered Ada 2005, not Ada 2012, it otherwise has excellent coverage of the Ada feature set, with a focus on programming-in-the-large.

> It has generics, too, though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages.

Is it wrong to read this sentence as snarky?

> Is it wrong to read this sentence as snarky?

Honest question, honest answer: yes. Dry humor maybe.

The reason why my snark detector passes this one is because there is no reason for the author to be snarky here.

I had to do one assignment in Ada during my undergrad. It felt like a gift from an alternate dimension.

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