41–50 of 242 posts
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!
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.
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 along their C and assembly legacy for the better part of two decades, until they got fast enough and compiler technology got good enough that richer languages were plausible.
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?
> Every language that has added sum types in the past twenty years has added, with its own syntax, what Ada's designers put in the original standard. While true, that doesn't mean that other language's sum types originated in Ada. As [1] states, > NPL and Hope are notable for being the first languages with call-by-pattern evaluation and algebraic data types and a modern language like Haskell has origins in Hope (from…
The origin of all sum types is in "Definition of new data types in ALGOL x", published by John McCarthy in October 1964, who introduced the keyword UNION for such types (he proposed "union" for sum types, "cartesian" for product types, and also operator overloading for custom types). John McCarthy, the creator of LISP, had also many major contributions to ALGOL 60 and to its successors (e.g. he introduced recursive f…
If Rust didn't have (C-style) unions then its enum should be named union instead. But it does, so they needed a different name. As we work our way through the rough edges of Rust maybe this will stick up more and annoy me, but given Rust 1.95 just finally stabilized core::range::RangeInclusive, the fix for the wonky wheel that is core::ops::RangeInclusive we're not going to get there any time soon.
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?
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…
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.
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 remember many different symbols, so they prefer long texts using keywords resembling a natural language.
The anti-verbose camp, to which I belong, argues that they can remember mathematical symbols and other such symbols, and that for them it is much more important to see on a screen an amount of program as big as possible, to avoid the need of moving back and forth through the source text.
Both camps claim that what they support is the way to make the easiest to read source programs, and this must indeed be true for themselves.
So it seems that it is impossible to choose rules that can ensure the best readability for all program readers or maintainers.
My opinion is that source programs must not be stored and edited as text, but as abstract syntax trees. The program source editors and viewers should implement multiple kinds of views for the same source program, according to the taste of the user.
What?
#1 JavaScript doesn't have formal types. What does it even mean by "representation"?
#2 You can just define a variable and not export it. You can't import a variable that isn't exported.
There are several little LLM hallucinations like this throughout the article. It's distracting and annoying.
Edit: Look, I know that complaining about downvotes is annoying, but I find this genuinely perplexing. Could someone just explain what the hell that paragraph was supposed to mean instead of downvoting me?
Yes, it's verbose. I like verbosity; it forces clarity. Once you adjust, the code becomes easier to read, not harder. You spend less time guessing intent and more time verifying it. Or verify it, ignore what you verified, then go back and remind yourself you're an idiot when you realize the code your ignored was right. That might just be me.
In small, purpose-built applications, it's been pleasant to code with. The type system is strict but doesn't yell at you a lot. The language encourages you to be explicit about what the program is actually doing, especially when you're working close to the hardware, which is a nice feature.
It has quirks, like anything else. But most of them feel like the cost of writing better, safer code.
Ada doesn't try to be clever. It tries to be clear, even if it is as clear as mud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that evidence that the site was AI written?
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.