Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

Post by dreamcompiler » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

microtherion wrote: post #162

Someone wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ALGOL 60. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Compiler_co... : ”Dijkstra was known to be a fan of ALGOL 60, and worked on the team that implemented the first compiler for that language. He was closely involved in the ALGOL 60 development, realisation and popularisation.” Also: Haskell and pascal over C++ and Java ( https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs... )

…for CS instruction. I've never come across any indication that Dijkstra wrote actual code (in the sense of something executing on a computer) after 1970 or so. The algorithms in the EWD notes are all written in ALGOL style pseudocode. Dijkstra was the CS equivalent of the Patent Law concept of a "Non-Practicing Entity", which gave him great liberty to troll all programming languages without exposing his own choices…

Post by kragen » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #116

falcolas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Easy to implement the language specification. All features should be easy to understand. I'm not sure this is at all applicable to rust. Perhaps once there are more than the one, quickly mutating, implementation, we can say that it's easy to implement the specification. > - Reliability. The language should aid the design and development of reliable programs. This one feels a touch questionable, given the built-in…

> given the built-in "succeed or die" macros that simplify code at the cost of reliability. I would consider a program that dies early to be more reliable (but less robust) than one that just soldiers on, probably doing wrong (and possibly dangerous) things. Regardless, it is the programmers choice whether to call panic!() or to try to handle an error gracefully and continue.

Post by shakna » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 1:33 AM UTC

devnulloverflow wrote: post #148

bdavis__ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the 'programmers' of those days lacked the sophistication and education to appreciate Ada. Just the mojo required to print an integer (having to instantiate a generic) was considered complicated Ada was also very slow to compile, on the order of 10 times slower than Jovial. (my experiences) Avionics systems back then were tiny. Jovial usually ran on a 16 bit processor. Ada enabled a certain maturity and corre…

> Just the mojo required to print an integer (having to instantiate a generic) was considered complicated That sounds complicated to me, in 2019 with 25 years of C++ experience. (And of course C++ error message sprouting mysterious stdlib templates also seems complicated to me).

    PutLine("The number is " & num);

    printf("The number is %zu\n", num);

Post by davesims » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 1:36 AM UTC

elamje wrote: post #172

jeffdavis wrote: post #40

There is some overlap in the use cases between Ada-in-the-mainstream (which seems to be what the article is suggesting) and Rust. The existence of Rust will make it even harder for Ada to break out of its existing domains. Both seem to have good ecosystems, but quite different. Ada has more high-assurance tooling and practices. Rust has more in terms of packaging and general-purpose high level libraries. With Ada, it…

Interesting, I am highly interested in convincing NASA to start using Rust for their embedded systems they use on ISS experiments and such. I would love to get more widespread adoption at the embedded system level.

Post by im_down_w_otp » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 1:53 AM UTC

devnulloverflow wrote: post #151

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're getting at here I tbink, but one of the ecosystem challenges we run into is that while Rust is abstractly a fantastic choice for the domain of systems development that would often be served by Ada (in fact we think it's a lot better in some respects because we can do more statically ahead of time, that Ada does dynamically at runtime, by abusing the Rust type system and borrow-checker), the R…

> The two languages, ecosystems, and communities seem to have largely non-overlapping objectives despite having overlapping technical capabilities. I keep thinking servers should be written a bit more like embedded thingies. (Though I suspect the actual trend is in the other direction). Both kinds of software deeply interested an asynchrony and concurrency (though not necessarily parallelism). And both also tend to t…