2 ms·

Yeah I took Ada for CS 210/211 back in 1991, are we there yet?

Jtsummers 5y ago
Ada's good, but it will never win. The open source compilers are solid, but no one wants to learn it. It's (depending on who you ask): Too old, too verbose, BDSM programming, not Rust, not Haskell, not C. It has a lot of positive features going for it, but it is verbose. That verbosity is a major distraction for people who can't handle it, they want their very short keywords or, better, no keywords just symbols. Curly braces are somehow better than begin/end even though begin/end really aren't hard to type. Ada shines, particularly, in the long tail of system maintenance, not in the writing (arguable: the type system certainly helps a lot in the writing, the syntax doesn't). So I press for it where it belongs, and don't where it doesn't. But when someone laments the state of type systems, I point it out.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Give it a new syntax, and try again… It's not so difficult nowadays to write a "syntax-transpiler". The hard part, the language, would remain the same. People seem having done so successfully with OCaml, see ReScript.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    The verbosity can only be removed at a superficial level. Many people object to begin and end, but they’d chafe even more if they got further. For good reasons (Ada leans toward explicit declarations in favor of implicit ones) you have to list each sub program you depend on in a module by name. Even if you don’t import it’s symbols. And you have to explicitly instantiate generics (like C++ templates) rather than the compiler inferring your intention. Things like that cannot be removed from the language so only a superficial improvement can be achieved, for what benefit?
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      It's difficult to design whole languages (you won't get anywhere close some adoption in production at important places under ten years I guess; if you're lucky of course). Having already something that proved its merit and strong foundations is for sure a good starter for a "new language" (as it would streamline the process to create such "new" language drastically). People are carving for powerful, safe, fast languages. So there is a market. If it's "only" about the verbosity and some cumbersome edges this could be fixed with some "overlay syntax". To be honest I'm one of those people that looked a few times at Ada as it was said to be powerful, fast, and safe. But it looks so awkward in my eyes; even I know I should not judge languages by syntax! The look-and-feel is just a strong point. I guess it's not only me… So I suspect a syntactic make-over could give new life to an old but powerful language. Just by making it look more "modern" (whatever this means).

Ada's good, but it will never win. The open source compilers are solid, but no one wants to learn it. It's (depending on who you ask): Too old, too verbose, BDSM programming, not Rust, not Haskell, not C. It has a lot of positive features going for it, but it is verbose. That verbosity is a major distraction for people who can't handle it, they want their very short keywords or, better, no keywords just symbols. Curly braces are somehow better than begin/end even though begin/end really aren't hard to type. Ada shines, particularly, in the long tail of system maintenance, not in the writing (arguable: the type system certainly helps a lot in the writing, the syntax doesn't). So I press for it where it belongs, and don't where it doesn't. But when someone laments the state of type systems, I point it out.

still_grokking 5y ago
Give it a new syntax, and try again… It's not so difficult nowadays to write a "syntax-transpiler". The hard part, the language, would remain the same. People seem having done so successfully with OCaml, see ReScript.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  The verbosity can only be removed at a superficial level. Many people object to begin and end, but they’d chafe even more if they got further. For good reasons (Ada leans toward explicit declarations in favor of implicit ones) you have to list each sub program you depend on in a module by name. Even if you don’t import it’s symbols. And you have to explicitly instantiate generics (like C++ templates) rather than the compiler inferring your intention. Things like that cannot be removed from the language so only a superficial improvement can be achieved, for what benefit?
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    It's difficult to design whole languages (you won't get anywhere close some adoption in production at important places under ten years I guess; if you're lucky of course). Having already something that proved its merit and strong foundations is for sure a good starter for a "new language" (as it would streamline the process to create such "new" language drastically). People are carving for powerful, safe, fast languages. So there is a market. If it's "only" about the verbosity and some cumbersome edges this could be fixed with some "overlay syntax". To be honest I'm one of those people that looked a few times at Ada as it was said to be powerful, fast, and safe. But it looks so awkward in my eyes; even I know I should not judge languages by syntax! The look-and-feel is just a strong point. I guess it's not only me… So I suspect a syntactic make-over could give new life to an old but powerful language. Just by making it look more "modern" (whatever this means).