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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

#61

Post by twoodfin »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #52
twoodfin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’ve never directly played with Ada but my understanding is that it was very much both.

Ada includes a number of critical abstractions that require either dynamic runtime code (slow runtime) or the proverbial sufficiently smart compiler (slow compile-time).

These were for good reasons, like safety and the need to define concurrent systems within the language. But they were too heavyweight for the commodity hardware of the era.

Nowadays, languages like Go, C++, Java, Rust, … have no trouble with similar abstractions because optimizers have gotten really good (particularly with inlining) and the hardware has cycles to spare.

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

#62

Post by globalchatads »

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.

[dead]

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

#63

Post by acomjean »

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.

A huge factor. I used ada for years and the fact everyone I worked with did hobby projects in other languages didn’t help it. And most of us liked Ada.

It had other warts the string handling wasn’t great, which was a huge problem. It was slow too in a time where that mattered more (we had c and ada in our code base.). I remember the concurrency not using the OSs so the one place we used it was a pain. HPUX had an amazing quasi real time extensions, so we just ran a bunch of processes.

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

#64

Post by twoodfin »

aeve890 wrote: post #56
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 un…

LLMs do not currently improve the style of typical HN writing. Maybe someday they will; this article is less painfully bad than those of a few months ago.

The main problem with this article is that it appears to have been basically written out of whole cloth by the LLM, there’s no novel insight here about Ada beyond what you could fit in a short prompt + the Wikipedia article.

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

#65

Post by microtherion »

donatj wrote: post #41

I like the article overall but the continually repeated 'Language X didn't have that until ' is very grating after the first ten or so. I also wish there were concrete code examples. Show me what you are talking about rather than just telling me how great it is. Put some side by side comparisons!

You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.

So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.

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

#66

Post by shrubble »

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.

The GNU ADA compiler was first released in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAT

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

#67

Post by zozbot234 »

graemep wrote: post #31
askUq wrote: post #11

From the main page of this website: "These are not positions. They are proposals — structures through which a subject might be examined rather than verdicts about it." The entire site is AI written.

How is that evidence that the site was AI written?

The combination of emdashes and inane non-sequiturs in "These are not X. They're Y" style is pretty damning.

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

#68

Post by mcdonje »

donatj wrote: post #41

I like the article overall but the continually repeated 'Language X didn't have that until ' is very grating after the first ten or so. I also wish there were concrete code examples. Show me what you are talking about rather than just telling me how great it is. Put some side by side comparisons!

I imagine an ada dev would find the pattern grating over the decades, so it reads like an expression of that experience.

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

#69

Post by rhubarbtree »

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.

Strange comment. GNAT?

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

#70

Post by microtherion »

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

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.
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