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Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

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Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#51

Post by leoc »

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #34
adrian_b wrote: post #23

Ada is a language that had a lot of useful features much earlier than any of the languages that are popular today, and some of those features are still missing from the languages easily available today. In the beginning Ada has been criticized mainly for 2 reasons, it was claimed that it is too complex and it was criticized for being too verbose. Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later l…

> Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada I don’t think you really understand what you’re saying here. I have worked on an ada compiler for the best part of a decade. It’s one of the most complex languages there is, up there with C++ and C#, and probably rust

Mind you, that suggests that the sentence is at least half-true even if "much more complex" is a big overstatement, since Rust, "modern" C++ and the later evolutions of C# are all relatively recent. (What would have compared to Ada in complexity back in the day? Common Lisp, Algol 68?)

As a matter of general interest, what features or elements of Ada make it particularly hard to compile, or compile well? (And are there parts which look like they might be difficult to manage but aren't?)

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#52

Post by michaelcampbell »

twoodfin wrote: post #42
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #39

Ada was also ignored because the typical compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars. No open source or free compiler existed during the decades where popular languages could be had for free. I think that is the biggest factor of all.

Ada’s failure to escape its niche is overdetermined. Given the sophistication of the language and the compiler technology of the day, there was no way Ada was going to run well on 1980’s microcomputers. Intel built the i432 “mainframe on a chip” with a bunch of Ada concepts baked into the hardware for performance, and it was still as slow as a dog. And as we now know, microcomputers later ate the world, carrying alon…

I used it a bit a Uni and remember enjoying it, but can you say what was slow about it; compilation or runtime or all of it?

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#54

Post by adrian_b »

timschmidt wrote: post #5

It'd be a neat trick to have a single unified language which could bridge the gap between software and hardware description languages.

The hardware description languages, even if they have a single language specification, are divided into 2 distinct subsets, one used for synthesis, i.e. for hardware design, and one used for simulation, i.e. for hardware verification.

The subset required for hardware synthesis/design, cannot be unified completely with a programming language, because it needs a different semantics, though the syntax can be made somewhat similar, as with VHDL that was derived from Ada, while Verilog was derived from C. However, the subset used for simulation/verification, outside the proper hardware blocks, can be pretty much identical with a programming language.

So in principle one could have a pair of harmonized languages, one a more or less typical programming language used for verification and a dedicated hardware description language used only for synthesis.

The current state is not too far from this, because many simulators have interfaces between HDLs and some programming languages, so you can do much verification work in something like C++, instead of SystemVerilog or VHDL. For instance, using C++ for all verification tasks is possible when using Verilator to simulate the hardware blocks.

I am not aware of any simulator that would allow synthesis in VHDL coupled with writing test benches in Ada, which are a better fit than VHDL with C++, but it could be done.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#55

Post by twoodfin »

boxed wrote: post #50
twoodfin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence is that the article’s writing is terrible. It repeats the same rhetorical devices over and over, dressing up a series of facts in false profundity, because there’s no actual authorial insight here. It’s just “write a well-researched article that demonstrates how ahead of its time the Ada language was” + matmul.

Humans are not gods of writing that will please all audiences and make no mistakes.

Neither of those standards are what I’m talking about.

Obviously this article was highly pleasing to the hn audience as it’s currently sitting at #1. It’s still garbage, because it doesn’t have any interesting ideas behind it. Certainly not commensurate with its length.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#56

Post by aeve890 »

shminge wrote: post #36

I really don't want this to be AI writing because I enjoyed it, but as other commenters have pointed out, the rate of publishing (according to the linked Twitter account) is very rapid. I'm worried that I can't tell.

>the rate of publishing (according to the linked Twitter account) is very rapid.

I've written almost 50 blog posts in the last 3 years. All in draft, never published mostly because a crippling imposter syndrome and fear of criticism. But every now and then I wake up full of confidence and think "this is it. today I'll click publish I don't give a fuck. All in". Never happens. Maybe this author was in the same boat until a month ago. I know there's a high chance that's just a bot but I can understand if it's not and how devastating has to be to overcome the fear of showing your thoughts to the world and being labeled a bot. If it's not already obvious English is not my first language and I've used LLMs to check my grammar and improve the style. Maybe all my posts smell like chatpgt now and this just adds to the fear of being dismissed as slop.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#57

Post by coldcode »

The US Air Force intended to use ADA, but had to use JOVIAL instead because ADA took so long to be developed. Most people have never heard of JOVIAL but it still exists in the USAF as a legacy.

I worked with JOVIAL as part of my first project as a programmer in 1981, even though we didn't even have a full JOVIAL compiler there yet (it existed elsewhere). I remember all the talk about the future being ADA but it was only an incomplete specification at the time.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#58

Post by init1 »

adrian_b wrote: post #46
init1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbosity is a feature not a bug. Programming is a human activity and thus should use human language and avoid encoded forms that require decoding to understand. The use of abbreviations should be avoided as it obsfucates the meaning and purpose of code from a reader.

The programming community is strongly divided between those who believe that verbosity is a feature and not a bug and those who believe that verbosity is a bug and not a feature. A reconciliation between these 2 camps appears impossible. Therefore I think that the ideal programming language should admit 2 equivalent representations, to satisfy both kinds of people. The pro-verbose camp argues that they cannot remembe…

It is not that I cannot remember the symbols - I don't want to; I want the language to plainly explain itself to me. Furthermore every language has it's own set of unique symbols. For new readers to a language you first have to familiarize yourself with the new symbols. I remember my first few times reading rust... It still makes my head spin. I had to keep looking up what everything did. If the plain keyword doesn't directly tell you what it's doing at least it hints at it.

To be clear Ada specifically talks about all this in the Ada reference manual in the Introduction. It was specifically designed for readers as opposed to writers for very good reasons and it explains why. It's exactly one of the features other languages will eventually learn they need and will independently "discover" some number of years in the future.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#59

Post by phplovesong »

I would never work on projects that ADA is used for.

1. Would never work on "missile tech" or other "kills people" tech.

2. Would never work for (civ) aircraft tech, as i would probably burn out for the stress of messing something up and having a airplane crash.

That said, im sure its also used for stuff that does not kill people, or does not have a high stress level.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#60

Post by eager_learner »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #39

Ada was also ignored because the typical compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars. No open source or free compiler existed during the decades where popular languages could be had for free. I think that is the biggest factor of all.

This. Nothing can compete with free.
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