Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
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Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#2I really like the language, but the only compiler I'd trust is the adacore one and I imagine it is pretty pricey for commercial work
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#3If you've done VHDL, you'll be familiar with Ada's syntax. When the DoD commissioned the design of VHDL, they required that its syntax be based on Ada.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#4I really like the language, but the only compiler I'd trust is the adacore one and I imagine it is pretty pricey for commercial work
Why not FSF’s GNAT? It’s been a while since I used it, but I remember preferring its error messages to some commercial offering we had around.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#5I first read about Ada in JARGON:
Ada:: n. A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made
mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the
Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that,
technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind
of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult
to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle
(one common description is "The PL/1 of the 1980s"; hackers find
the exception handling and inter-process communication features
particularly hilarious). Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron
who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with
Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the
mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use her name has
been latterly put to; the kindest thing that has been said about it
it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get
out from inside its vast, {elephantine} bulk.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#6What is the employment market like for Ada?
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#7If you've done VHDL, you'll be familiar with Ada's syntax. When the DoD commissioned the design of VHDL, they required that its syntax be based on Ada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#History
It's interesting to see how Verilog & C both took over there in the industry. There's probably a chasm where the extra typedness isn't worth the velocity cost at the beginning of a project and when it's valuable the weight of switching can be too great. I think the middle ground is a language where you can relax some of your rules but then as pieces mature you can start enforcing stricter typing rules.
I observe the same effect on other things like unit tests except the effect is the reverse of what people typically think. Lots of unit tests early on help you write correct code initially but as code matures it's just wasted automation time & it can end up ossifying some architectural decisions (ie. a change ripples out & causes a large amount of tests to need updating).
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#8I first read about Ada in JARGON: Ada:: n. A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one co…
Languages with the kind of constraints (sometimes kicked up to 11) that inspired the term “bondage and discipline languages” [0] have come back into vogue in a big way since the heyday of the Jargon File, and are in many cases the new “languages of choice” [1].
[0] http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/bondage-and-discipline-la...
[1] http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/L/languages-of-choice.html
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#9During weekend installfest/hackfest events at a LUG that I used to attend, there was always this one guy who would sit in front of a pair of laptops and code in Ada.
One thing I remember about it is just how much it reminded me of Pascal.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#10I really like the language, but the only compiler I'd trust is the adacore one and I imagine it is pretty pricey for commercial work
Why not FSF’s GNAT? It’s been a while since I used it, but I remember preferring its error messages to some commercial offering we had around.
AdaCore's compiler is GNAT.
They sell a pro version with bells and whistles but AFAIK the actual compiler is the same.