What is the employment market like for Ada?
How much do you like maintaining legacy DoD projects?
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
#12First, this is a great introduction article to Ada. It's a great history lesson, and analysis of where it's used and why.
That said, it seems to be arguing for something in a vacuum. Where is the mention of other new programming languages that also fit this category? Where is the mention of Rust? Rust fits all the same requirements:
- A general, flexible design that adapts to satisfy the needs of embedded computer applications.
- Reliability. The language should aid the design and development of reliable programs.
- Ease of maintainability. Code should be readable and programming decisions explicit.
- Easy to produce efficient code with. Inefficient constructs should be easily identifiable.
- No unnecessary complexity. Semantic structure should be consistent and minimize the number of concepts.
- Easy to implement the language specification. All features should be easy to understand.
- Machine independence. The language shall not be bound to any hardware or OS details.
- Complete definition. All parts of the language shall be fully and unambiguously defined.
The exception is possibly the last one, complete definition. But that's debatable as Rust does have a reference, but no one wants to go as far as calling it a spec. (Also, I know some people think Rust has some "unnecessary" complexity, personally I do not). The article goes on to compare to C, but doesn't mention some of the new features of C++ that make it safer, or Rust which is approximately as safe as Ada. So why would I pick Ada over other modern languages?
btw, I really enjoyed Steve Klabnik's post on learning Ada: https://words.steveklabnik.com/learning-ada
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#13If 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
Also if you've written any PL/SQL stored procedures in Oracle.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#14What is the employment market like for Ada?
Like not exist. Seems like NSA is the biggest employer.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can't use a lot of the libraries and still get the runtime exception to where it doesn't have to be released as GPL I think.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#16I 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…
Although the editor of the jargon file was confident he was able to speak for all "Hackers", I'm not sure they were ever quite as narrow-minded as he likes to make out.
(Many of the early criticisms of Ada seem a bit silly in hindsight. For example people used to like to make a big thing of it taking three or four years for fully standards-compliant compilers to appear, which seems pretty good going compared to, say, C++98. Similarly, hardware from the early 80s sometimes struggled to compile Ada code efficiently, but it turns out that processors were getting faster rather rapidly around that time.)
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#17I 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
I remember reading the first entry many years ago and wondering why anyone would want to use a language with type enforcement when you could have duck typing. (I thought of types as something that had been enforced by the lack of expressive power of old languages in which the types were effectively closer to the machine -- like describing the size of a machine word or something.)
Later on I experienced the famous feature of Haskell in which it takes a while to write a valid program that compiles at all, but then the program immediately works correctly the first time and is free of several large classes of bugs.
So yeah, excellent description of that trend!
Edit: another closely related phenomenon is people gaining a new appreciation for formal grammars and formal specifications, understanding how hard parsing problems are and how bad the consequences of underspecification and undefined behavior can be. I imagine in the Jargon File heyday it would have been made fun of to use formal specifications everywhere, but now some of the most successful systems and tools use them to good effect. Maybe there was a "formal methods winter" or "formalism winter" to parallel the AI Winter?
Edit 2: also, as a sibling comment mentions, these tools are much nicer to use now than they were then. Protobuf and friends do something akin to what ASN.1 did, but the tools around them are so much nicer!
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#18I 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
Not saying strong typing is good or bad, but I think tools allow strong typing much more conveniently now than when that B&D sentiment was written. Back then, you'd use vi/emacs and have to argue constantly with the type checker until it was placated. Now of course, your IDE will complete based on what's allowed in the Context.You().are.typing and it's more of a correct by construction affair. Ada might have faired differently if those tools existed then.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#19I 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…
Although the editor of the jargon file was confident he was able to speak for all "Hackers", I'm not sure they were ever quite as narrow-minded as he likes to make out. (Many of the early criticisms of Ada seem a bit silly in hindsight. For example people used to like to make a big thing of it taking three or four years for fully standards-compliant compilers to appear, which seems pretty good going compared to, say,…
Also, something I'd read before (though I can't find a reference now) is that the "design by committee" was that everything filtered through Jean Ichbiah (I think), who acted as benevolent dictator for the design process, and he was careful about the features forming a cohesive whole.
Another thing was a take on the Jargon File entry where a good amount of hacker backlash was due to it being a language forced by the DoD, so of course it is going to be bad.
Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
#20What is the employment market like for Ada?
There's some non-DOD avionics floating around that are ADA, I guess because of requirements and regulatory overlaps.