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Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days (2024)
gautiersblog.blogspot.com
For those only having a quick look, the charts do not have the y axis start at zero, the differences are much smaller than it looks.
For those only having a quick look, the charts do not have the y axis start at zero, the differences are much smaller than it looks.
Also, they seemingly already had a BWT lying around (which is seemingly not counted in “from scratch in a couple of days”), and there is no mention of speed.
It seemed like it should have been the standard for a lot of desktop applications for the 90's and 2000's.
Simply as one who does not use Ada I had hoped to be a bit more informed about it.
Well that was disappointing. I was hoping to see a discussion about writing a zip encoder in Ada. How the language was used, values of the language for this kind of work. How it’s easier or harder to do. Maybe a bunch of Ada source code. Simply as one who does not use Ada I had hoped to be a bit more informed about it.
I know the history of why Ada failed, but it always seemed like such a neat language that shouldn't have failed. It seemed like it should have been the standard for a lot of desktop applications for the 90's and 2000's.
I have my own thoughts that I'd be happy to share, but I don't want to spoil your opinion with them.
(This goes for basically anyone who's interested in talking about it, I think it's a fascinating bit of history.)
I know the history of why Ada failed, but it always seemed like such a neat language that shouldn't have failed. It seemed like it should have been the standard for a lot of desktop applications for the 90's and 2000's.
Do you have sources you could point to? I once read that it's a great language mired by a designed by committee ecosystem. I really liked the language when I tinkered with it a bunch around 2010 but moved on after work pushed me to other languages like C# for GUI stuff. First language I used with simple built in concurrency.
I know the history of why Ada failed, but it always seemed like such a neat language that shouldn't have failed. It seemed like it should have been the standard for a lot of desktop applications for the 90's and 2000's.
> I know the history of why Ada failed, Do you have sources you could point to? I once read that it's a great language mired by a designed by committee ecosystem. I really liked the language when I tinkered with it a bunch around 2010 but moved on after work pushed me to other languages like C# for GUI stuff. First language I used with simple built in concurrency.
Specifically, I think these three paragraphs near the end are critical:
> I'm reading a great book now called Why People Believe Weird Things, by Micheal Shermer, in which the author explains what rational thinking is, and how skepticism is a process. Basically, people believe something because that want to, not because of any scientific arguments you make.
> There are guys out there who dislike Ada, but they do so because they want to, not because of any rational analysis of its merits or flaws. Sometimes even their arguments are factually incorrect, like saying that "Ada was designed by committee," ignoring the fact that Jean vetoed language design arguments that were 12-to-1 against him. It's not unlike creationists who explain the "fact" that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (No, it does not, as any book on freshman physics will tell you.)
> I've explained the reasons Ada why I think is not as popular as C++, and I'd like to hope that it will convince Ada's detractors that Ada isn't so bad after all. But as Robert Dewar pointed out, a person who has made an irrational decision probably isn't going to be swayed by rational arguments!
That is, people aren't really rational. A choice was made to dislike it, it entered into the culture and to this day people dislike it because they think they should dislike it. They don't even spend 5 minutes studying it to see that half of what they've heard (if not more) is flat out wrong. In several Ada discussions on HN people claim its syntax is like COBOL's, for instance. Not just similar in being keyword heavy, but practically the same. Sometimes they even provide Ada "examples" that won't even compile. That's the kind of nonsense that happens when people turn off their brains or refuse to turn on their brains. You see it in many Lisp discussions as well.