4 ms·

This really makes me want to try Ada, if I could find a good fit for its low-level features (game development, maybe?) The biggest thing that would make it ann

This really makes me want to try Ada, if I could find a good fit for its low-level features (game development, maybe?) The biggest thing that would make it annoying to write in is the verbose syntax--it's like the worst of Java, VB, and Standard ML. And yet, that same verbosity makes it kind of nice to read. I think there's an inherent friction between "write-friendly" and "read-friendly" languages. It would be nice to have a language with a few different "dialects" (the way Ruby often has several equivalent ways to write certain constructs), such that a programmer could write the initial code in an extremely terse language, then run a formatter and get back a beautifully-formatted, much more verbose form of the same code.

Keyframe 10y ago
Verbosity leaves me on the edge as well. But then I look at the promise of what Ada brings. It would mean trading in a bit more writing time for a possibility of a lot less debugging time.
- fghgfdfg 10y ago
  Anecdotally, it's vastly reduced debugging time in my own personal projects. My most notable problems have all turned out to be the result of things like using the wrong input, or misunderstanding some external spec. At first it was actually a little unnerving that things weren't breaking, but with time I've come to expect that. I came from C++, where I always joked that if things appeared to work correctly the first time around something serious was broken. It's not free though. You do end up spending more time getting the compiler to actually accept your code. With time I've gotten much better at this, although at first it could be quite a fight. But a compiler error is so much nicer than a bug, so I do think it's very worth it. And when it comes to coding, how long it takes to type is pretty irrelevant as long as you can type half decently. Typing the code is really the easiest part.

Keyframe 10y ago

Verbosity leaves me on the edge as well. But then I look at the promise of what Ada brings. It would mean trading in a bit more writing time for a possibility of a lot less debugging time.

fghgfdfg 10y ago
Anecdotally, it's vastly reduced debugging time in my own personal projects. My most notable problems have all turned out to be the result of things like using the wrong input, or misunderstanding some external spec. At first it was actually a little unnerving that things weren't breaking, but with time I've come to expect that. I came from C++, where I always joked that if things appeared to work correctly the first time around something serious was broken. It's not free though. You do end up spending more time getting the compiler to actually accept your code. With time I've gotten much better at this, although at first it could be quite a fight. But a compiler error is so much nicer than a bug, so I do think it's very worth it. And when it comes to coding, how long it takes to type is pretty irrelevant as long as you can type half decently. Typing the code is really the easiest part.