25 ms·

I don't mean to suggest that at all -- I have great respect for those people, particularly Rich Hickey, whose framing of "simple" vs "easy" is vital to these di

I don't mean to suggest that at all -- I have great respect for those people, particularly Rich Hickey, whose framing of "simple" vs "easy" is vital to these discussions. But it's clear that a language like Clojure is not a good fit for million-line, decades-old codebases. Java wasn't explicitly designed for large-scale engineering either; it's north star was Write Once, Run Anywhere. In short, I think there are very few languages that prioritize engineering to the exclusion of other features, and Go is one of them. Ada is another; it was explicitly designed for large-scale engineering, but hasn't seen nearly as much success as Go. I'd like to learn more about why it failed. Perhaps it was the language itself, or maybe it was merely a timing issue, or the fact that it was backed by the government. This comment has some good info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825008

Jtsummers 5y ago
Why Ada failed has been discussed ad nauseum including on here. Early compilers were $$,$$$ per seat and proprietary, they're still easily $,$$$ per seat. Good open source compilers came later, there's still a strong disparity between the FOSS and commercial compilers and tooling. The language was a mandate from US DOD which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It largely sat in the same space as Fortran and C, C was free (or much less expensive) and more readily available even when it did cost. Cosmetic: People strongly dislike the verbosity of Ada. Some parts are reasonable to consider changing (but really are just cosmetic) like begin/end versus {/}. Other verbose portions are hard to change without fundamentally altering the language. You want to print integers and strings and you don't want to have to use Integer'Image(X) all over the place? with Text_IO; use Text_IO; with Ada.Integer_Text_IO; use Ada.Integer_Text_IO; Now Put and Put_Line can be used with both strings and integers. Oh, you want to print more types? More withing for you. I don't mind it, you don't need to print in every package, but it is very cumbersome. If you want to write a quick CLI tool, Ada is not your language (though I've done it), go for Perl, Python, Ruby, sh/bash, or even Go. C and C++ can be easier for that purpose. But once you start scaling it's a very good language. The only way to get Ada in the mainstream now is to make it much cheaper and greatly improve the FOSS compilers and tooling, and have SPARK/Ada support an increasingly large subset including approaching feature parity with respect to memory safety as Rust. That's being worked on, but it's a non-trivial problem.

Jtsummers 5y ago

Why Ada failed has been discussed ad nauseum including on here. Early compilers were $$,$$$ per seat and proprietary, they're still easily $,$$$ per seat. Good open source compilers came later, there's still a strong disparity between the FOSS and commercial compilers and tooling. The language was a mandate from US DOD which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It largely sat in the same space as Fortran and C, C was free (or much less expensive) and more readily available even when it did cost. Cosmetic: People strongly dislike the verbosity of Ada. Some parts are reasonable to consider changing (but really are just cosmetic) like begin/end versus {/}. Other verbose portions are hard to change without fundamentally altering the language. You want to print integers and strings and you don't want to have to use Integer'Image(X) all over the place? with Text_IO; use Text_IO; with Ada.Integer_Text_IO; use Ada.Integer_Text_IO; Now Put and Put_Line can be used with both strings and integers. Oh, you want to print more types? More withing for you. I don't mind it, you don't need to print in every package, but it is very cumbersome. If you want to write a quick CLI tool, Ada is not your language (though I've done it), go for Perl, Python, Ruby, sh/bash, or even Go. C and C++ can be easier for that purpose. But once you start scaling it's a very good language. The only way to get Ada in the mainstream now is to make it much cheaper and greatly improve the FOSS compilers and tooling, and have SPARK/Ada support an increasingly large subset including approaching feature parity with respect to memory safety as Rust. That's being worked on, but it's a non-trivial problem.