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Heres a lecture at MIT about Ada from a favorite programmer of mine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXwnk8Cr0c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXwnk8Cr0c I d

Heres a lecture at MIT about Ada from a favorite programmer of mine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXwnk8Cr0c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXwnk8Cr0c I do not understand the Medium authors definition of "success". I get similarly confused when web commentators use the term "won" (e.g., language X "won") when discussing programming languages. Won what? IMO, the presenter (RIP) was quite successful. Im sure Ada "won" many contracts.

derefr 9y ago
Won = monopsonized the market? I.e. so many employers looking for it that it influences education and training for people who have no interest in that particular language, but just want to learn “a” language. See: Java wining enterprise programming; Python winning DevOps scripting; FORTRAN wining numerical simulation way back. Also see: PHP winning SMB web consulting in the 90s (resulting in e.g. the Wordpress plugin ecosystem); RoR winning SMB web consulting in the 00s (resulting in the the current “horizontally scale by running more containers with a load-balancer in front” approach to web-app deployment, due mostly to Ruby’s horrible concurrency story at the time); Node.js winning SMB web consulting in the [first half of the] 10s (resulting in the rise of websocket-driven SPAs and a million Node build tools.)
- feelin_googley 9y ago
  According to the lecture, for Ada I guess it would be winning avionics. The presentation has some interesting artifacts, such as one student asking what "portable" means and another asking what is "object-oriented" programming. Maybe "hyped" success is sometimes confused with "real" success. The later type may not always be as visible. He addresses this in the lecture. He suggests people often make statements about programming language usage in industry without actual knowledge of what some organizations are really using (beyond what is announced publicly, or hyped).

derefr 9y ago

Won = monopsonized the market? I.e. so many employers looking for it that it influences education and training for people who have no interest in that particular language, but just want to learn “a” language. See: Java wining enterprise programming; Python winning DevOps scripting; FORTRAN wining numerical simulation way back. Also see: PHP winning SMB web consulting in the 90s (resulting in e.g. the Wordpress plugin ecosystem); RoR winning SMB web consulting in the 00s (resulting in the the current “horizontally scale by running more containers with a load-balancer in front” approach to web-app deployment, due mostly to Ruby’s horrible concurrency story at the time); Node.js winning SMB web consulting in the [first half of the] 10s (resulting in the rise of websocket-driven SPAs and a million Node build tools.)

feelin_googley 9y ago
According to the lecture, for Ada I guess it would be winning avionics. The presentation has some interesting artifacts, such as one student asking what "portable" means and another asking what is "object-oriented" programming. Maybe "hyped" success is sometimes confused with "real" success. The later type may not always be as visible. He addresses this in the lecture. He suggests people often make statements about programming language usage in industry without actual knowledge of what some organizations are really using (beyond what is announced publicly, or hyped).