4 ms·

Is Ads the most hyped language? No. Is it a niche language? Yes. Does that mean it's a failure? No. I'm sorry but this blog post is a really superficial treatm

Is Ads the most hyped language? No. Is it a niche language? Yes. Does that mean it's a failure? No. I'm sorry but this blog post is a really superficial treatment of the subject. How languages rise, fall or command their own little space is a very interesting topic worthy of a better discussion.

stickfigure 9y ago
Agreed, there is so much more interesting material that could have been written. Ada once was a hyped language! In the late 80s when the DOD mandated it. It would be interesting to hear the history of Ada's rise and fall. My CSC sequence (started 1990) was taught in Ada. I was already writing a lot of Pascal so it was an easy switch. I remember feeling no great love for the compiler and tooling, however.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I worked at a NASA contractor around 1990. They had these dedicated Rational workstations with an IDE just for Ada, it made it kind of fun. My recollection is it was better than other IDEs at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000 Today it sounds silly because we can get a portable/configurable IDE for every language under the sun on any platform but back then this was amazing. We did have some process that I can't recall right now to port this to DEC/IBM mainframes/minicomputers.
- deaddodo 9y ago
  It may have been "hyped" by some, but it never had any true institutional or corporate penetration. It was always the "military language" with GNAT even being funded by the USAF directly. And in that field, it ruled the roost; and still has strong penetration as a legacy platform.
catnaroek 9y ago
The problem with Ada isn't that it's niche. The problem is that it has a gazillion features whose purpose is (ostensibly) to make programming errors easy to prevent, identify and correct, but fail miserably at it. There is more to programming than safety, but if safety is going to be one of your programming language's selling points, then the least you can do is get it right. The process for getting it right consists of the following steps: (0) Identify a concrete class X of programming errors you want to eradicate. (1) Postulate a mathematical theory of what it means for a program not to have errors of class X. (2) Develop proof techniques that are powerful enough to establish that “interesting” programs do not have errors of class X. (3) Design algorithms that use these proof techniques to prove, or at least validate a purported proof, that a program does not have errors of class X. Your algorithm must be able to analyze program fragments (modules, classes, whatever) independently, and combine information obtained from several program fragments without reanalyzing them from scratch.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  And no one without a PhD in applied mathematics will use it, unless it is ergonomic enough. Ada's failure in the mainstream, besides the compiler prices and hardware requirements of old systems, is lack of support for cowboy programming, so loved by users of languages like C, JavaScript, PHP and other similar ones.
  - catnaroek 9y ago
    It's an empirical fact that people use languages they couldn't have designed themselves. Designing a safe language requires mathematical sophistication. Using a safe language - less so. As for cowboy programming, Java and C# don't support it all that well, and they are very popular.
- abdulhaq 9y ago
  You don't need maths or proofs to improve the safety of a programming language. Also, surely it's as much a psychology /workflow / management issue as much as Rust-like memory management etc.
  - catnaroek 9y ago
    Last time I checked, psychology doesn't affect how a computer program runs.
    - abdulhaq 9y ago
      It affects the way it is developed: hurriedly, carefully, carelessly, etc. This, in a software team in the real world, is a significant factor in the consequent reliability of the software developed.
      - catnaroek 9y ago
        This suggests trying “scared that my wife and children will be executed if I do it wrong”.

stickfigure 9y ago

Agreed, there is so much more interesting material that could have been written. Ada once was a hyped language! In the late 80s when the DOD mandated it. It would be interesting to hear the history of Ada's rise and fall. My CSC sequence (started 1990) was taught in Ada. I was already writing a lot of Pascal so it was an easy switch. I remember feeling no great love for the compiler and tooling, however.

stevenwoo 9y ago
I worked at a NASA contractor around 1990. They had these dedicated Rational workstations with an IDE just for Ada, it made it kind of fun. My recollection is it was better than other IDEs at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000 Today it sounds silly because we can get a portable/configurable IDE for every language under the sun on any platform but back then this was amazing. We did have some process that I can't recall right now to port this to DEC/IBM mainframes/minicomputers.
deaddodo 9y ago
It may have been "hyped" by some, but it never had any true institutional or corporate penetration. It was always the "military language" with GNAT even being funded by the USAF directly. And in that field, it ruled the roost; and still has strong penetration as a legacy platform.

catnaroek 9y ago

The problem with Ada isn't that it's niche. The problem is that it has a gazillion features whose purpose is (ostensibly) to make programming errors easy to prevent, identify and correct, but fail miserably at it. There is more to programming than safety, but if safety is going to be one of your programming language's selling points, then the least you can do is get it right. The process for getting it right consists of the following steps: (0) Identify a concrete class X of programming errors you want to eradicate. (1) Postulate a mathematical theory of what it means for a program not to have errors of class X. (2) Develop proof techniques that are powerful enough to establish that “interesting” programs do not have errors of class X. (3) Design algorithms that use these proof techniques to prove, or at least validate a purported proof, that a program does not have errors of class X. Your algorithm must be able to analyze program fragments (modules, classes, whatever) independently, and combine information obtained from several program fragments without reanalyzing them from scratch.

pjmlp 9y ago
And no one without a PhD in applied mathematics will use it, unless it is ergonomic enough. Ada's failure in the mainstream, besides the compiler prices and hardware requirements of old systems, is lack of support for cowboy programming, so loved by users of languages like C, JavaScript, PHP and other similar ones.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  It's an empirical fact that people use languages they couldn't have designed themselves. Designing a safe language requires mathematical sophistication. Using a safe language - less so. As for cowboy programming, Java and C# don't support it all that well, and they are very popular.
abdulhaq 9y ago
You don't need maths or proofs to improve the safety of a programming language. Also, surely it's as much a psychology /workflow / management issue as much as Rust-like memory management etc.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  Last time I checked, psychology doesn't affect how a computer program runs.
  - abdulhaq 9y ago
    It affects the way it is developed: hurriedly, carefully, carelessly, etc. This, in a software team in the real world, is a significant factor in the consequent reliability of the software developed.
    - catnaroek 9y ago
      This suggests trying “scared that my wife and children will be executed if I do it wrong”.