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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

I almost see that as a feature. ;)

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