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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

#111

Post by beej71 »

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 prompted Claude for some demo code to appreciate the language and it did a good job. Definitely some pretty neat stuff in there that exposed some unrealized FOMO. Of course I knew of Ada for decades, but I never got into it.

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

#112

Post by kerblang »

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!

This is not a writeup of "Ada is better than everything else". The author is explaining how Ada achieved safety/reliability goals that your favorite language independently evolved much later on. That is why they kept bringing up year-of-arrival for comparison.

Examples would be a nice bonus but I think the author eschewed such because they weren't interested in writing a tutorial. They had a very specific point to make and stuck to it, resulting in a very informative but concise article that reads well because of its highly disciplined authorship.

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

#113

Post by cmrdporcupine »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #109
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.

I always found it funny when Rust came about, I can't help but feel like, and maybe I'm misremembering when I deep dove Ada the first time, Ada was our first "Rust" like language, maybe Delphi / Pascal is the only other really close one that became mainstream enough before Rust did?

Rust emerged from the language enthusiast community not a formal industry committee and in some ways that was its superpower.

I and many others have looked at Ada with some appreciation for decades. But the actual "community" around the language was foreign to me; government, defense contractors, etc places that frankly wouldn't even hire me.

It's got appealing constructs, and I grew up with the Wirth languages so I wans't put off by its syntax and style... and I even sometimes considered rewriting my OSS C++ pieces in it because I was so desperate for something better. But it was just a self-limiting box.

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

#114

Post by beej71 »

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.

What bugged me the most was that it was really not concise and a bit ranty. But I couldn't tell at a casual glance if it was AI or not.

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

#115

Post by adrian_b »

GhosT078 wrote: post #98
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.

I agree. I've never understood or accepted the claim that Ada is verbose. It's simply clear and expressive. If there were some alternative concise syntax for "Ada" then I would not want to use it (because it would not be Ada). This was proposed, as a joke, some years ago: https://www.adacore.com/blog/a-modern-syntax-for-ada This is an old but good article on the topic: https://www.embedded.com/expressive-vs-permissiv…

Because that is a joke, it proposes replacements only for a small set of Ada tokens and it is not clear how the proposal can be cleanly extended to the full set of Ada tokens.

Nevertheless in is possible to define a complete 1 to 1 mapping of all Ada syntactic tokens to a different set of tokens.

The resulting language will have exactly the same abstract syntax as Ada, so it is definitely exactly the same language, only with a different appearance.

For a seasoned Ada programmer, changing the appearance of the language may be repugnant, but for a newbie there may be no difference between two alternative sets of tokens, especially when the programmers are not native English speakers, so they do not feel any particular loyalty to words like "begin" and "loop", so they may not feel any advantage of using them instead of using some kind of brackets that would replace them.

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

#116

Post by Narishma »

shrubble wrote: post #66
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

That's a decade too late.

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

#117

Post by Narishma »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #69
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?

GNAT was too late to the party.

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

#118

Post by jordanb »

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.

Not really, the state of compilers pretty much sucked back then. GCC was the only real free compiler in the 80s and it wasn't really ready for prime time until the late 80s. You were paying (lots) of money for a compiler no matter what language you chose. And if you were targeting a new language the compiler was sure to suck.

Even in the late 90s Jamie Zawinski had a rant against C++. His argument for not using it? The compilers suck! C++ was the main "competitor" of Ada and it was a decade or more behind Ada through most of the time.

The "killer feature" of C++ against Ada (when it came to fighting against compiler maturity) was really that you could pretend to be writing C++ code but really just keep writing C-with-classes.

If Ada had put a modula or pascal compatibility mode in the language and produced a reference compiler that was based on a stable compiler in one of those languages, the history may have been different because people could have just written "PascAda" while waiting for the compilers to catch up.

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

#119

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Narishma wrote: post #116
shrubble wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a decade too late.

Let's just be honest that even if there was a free compiler in 1985 or earlier, there's no way that e.g. someone like Linus Torvalds or an RMS etc would have written various groundbreaking pieces of software on Ada. It was just in an entirely different headspace.

I was around then, and culturally there just wasn't this (legitimate) concern with safety in the more "hacker" and Unix community generally. C won headspace at the time precisely because it was minimal and close to the metal while providing the minimum of abstraction people wanted. Which was on the whole fine because the blast radius for mistakes was lower and the machines were simpler.

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

#120

Post by adrian_b »

jll29 wrote: post #107
adrian_b wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada has borrowed nothing from Modula. There are features common to Ada and Modula, but those have been taken by both languages from Xerox Mesa. The first version of Modula was designed with the explicit goal of making a simple small language that provided a part of the features of Xerox Mesa (including modules), after Wirth had spent a sabbatical year at Xerox. Nowadays Modula and its descendants are better known tha…

Any good reads on Mesa for the interested?

The most useful information is preserved at:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/

Some information may also exist in other subdirectories of "pdf/xerox".

There have been many references to Mesa in the research articles and the books published towards the end of the seventies and during the eighties, but those are hard to find today, as most of them may have not been digitized. Even if they were digitized, it is hard to search through them to find the relevant documents, because you would not know from the title whether Mesa is also discussed along with other programming languages.

In general, bitsavers.org is probably the most useful Internet resource about old computing hardware and software, because no secondary literature matches the original manuals of the computer vendors, which in the distant past had an excellent quality, unlike today.

Ada provides many features of Mesa, but not all of them and I regret that some Mesa features are missing from the languages that are popular today.

The loops with double exits of Python (i.e. with "else") have been inspired by Mesa, but they provide only a small subset of the features available in Mesa loops.

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