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I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by committee
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by committee' that wasn't really the case, but did have a lot of people critiquing it. It was a great language once you understood how to structure your programs. I think it would have had much better uptake if there were free/open source implementations of it back then, but I don't think the DoD even considered that, so it cost quite a bit of money to experiment with it and very few students had a chance to use it.
- 4thaccount 8y agoI'd argue it is largely true now. If the free version is GPL'd, students can easily use it, but a lot of folks won't want to develop in something that has what is likely to be a high commercial cost. I'm still curious how much they would charge me to use the commercial version to write some scientific software that will likely have no customers. Would they be lenient and not try to charge what they would for a developer at Boeing? I'd love to know as Ada and Spark just seem really cool.
- ThomasBHickey 8y agoThere is GNAT https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat
- 4thaccount 8y agoThat's what I'm referring to. I believe there is a runtime clause that means a program (Ex: hello world) isn't automatically under the GPL. However, a lot of the Adacore libraries are either GPL or commercial. At least this is how it has been explained to me.