3 ms·

We learned some Ada in school. I really liked it, but the free toolchain was poor (hard to get working properly, unintuitive) and the community stubbornly defen

We learned some Ada in school. I really liked it, but the free toolchain was poor (hard to get working properly, unintuitive) and the community stubbornly defended its various idiosyncrasies like its verbose Pascal syntax and its homegrown project file format. Most importantly, it just didn’t heave much of an open source ecosystem, and the community was pretty hostile and defensive toward newbies. But yeah, the language was neat! :)

johnisgood 8y ago
When did this happen? Have you checked its current state? It has been growing ever since. There are dozens of tools available today for free, and it is very easy to set up. I agree that its open source ecosystem needs to grow, but for that we do need more Ada programmers! :P By the way, I am really sorry if you experienced hostility from the community. May I ask where it took place? I had similar experiences with a variety of communities, even Rust. I try to not be demotivated from the language itself, after all, it is not particularly the language's fault, and there are people like that everywhere. They need to learn that what is obvious to them is not necessarily obvious to other people, and asking is a sign of wanting to learn, which I believe is a good thing. :)
- weberc2 8y ago
  Hmm, circa 2012. I've checked in on it a handful of times in the ensuing years, but I came across Go in 2014 and it ended up suiting my needs almost perfectly (rapid application development, simple, great performance, mostly safe, fantastic tooling/ecosystem, zero-runtime-dependencies, etc). As for where the hostility took place, it was most Ada proponents who would pop up in /r/programming, here on HN, etc. I'm sure the circumstances select for the most toxic folks from any community, but it seemed especially potent from Ada folks (could have been bad luck, ymmv and all that). Would love for Ada to modernize and improve tooling/ecosystem, but between Go and Rust, I'm afraid that the advantages for a modern Ada might be marginal. It seems unfortunate for Ada that it didn't modernize prior to 2012; it could have eaten both Go and Rust's lunch before they even existed.

johnisgood 8y ago

When did this happen? Have you checked its current state? It has been growing ever since. There are dozens of tools available today for free, and it is very easy to set up. I agree that its open source ecosystem needs to grow, but for that we do need more Ada programmers! :P By the way, I am really sorry if you experienced hostility from the community. May I ask where it took place? I had similar experiences with a variety of communities, even Rust. I try to not be demotivated from the language itself, after all, it is not particularly the language's fault, and there are people like that everywhere. They need to learn that what is obvious to them is not necessarily obvious to other people, and asking is a sign of wanting to learn, which I believe is a good thing. :)

weberc2 8y ago
Hmm, circa 2012. I've checked in on it a handful of times in the ensuing years, but I came across Go in 2014 and it ended up suiting my needs almost perfectly (rapid application development, simple, great performance, mostly safe, fantastic tooling/ecosystem, zero-runtime-dependencies, etc). As for where the hostility took place, it was most Ada proponents who would pop up in /r/programming, here on HN, etc. I'm sure the circumstances select for the most toxic folks from any community, but it seemed especially potent from Ada folks (could have been bad luck, ymmv and all that). Would love for Ada to modernize and improve tooling/ecosystem, but between Go and Rust, I'm afraid that the advantages for a modern Ada might be marginal. It seems unfortunate for Ada that it didn't modernize prior to 2012; it could have eaten both Go and Rust's lunch before they even existed.