13 ms·

Since I encountered Ada in the late 80s, I've often wondered how this would work out over a long lived project, even when I was young and full of confidence and

Since I encountered Ada in the late 80s, I've often wondered how this would work out over a long lived project, even when I was young and full of confidence and the expectation that long lived was going to be a thing of the path. C has been a headache in many ways, but one thing I've noticed is that there are many examples of very, very long-lived C projects, and not very many examples of very, very long-lived projects in most other languages (IBM, obviously, will disagree here, and COBOL). Some of that is related to C being a good fit for generating economic value at the beginning of the era that would now qualify as very long lived (20+ years, 30+ years), I'm sure, but it is interesting to consider that parts of some languages will not age well.

touisteur 5y ago
I've worked for 13 years on an Ada codebase initiated in the 90s. Ported from ppc to x86 then x86_64 to arm with mostly re-compilation and testing. Mind you, endianness was handled in a very ad-hoc (ugly but portable manner).
ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> there are many examples of very, very long-lived C projects Of course there are, because that's the 'native' language for all Unix' and Unix-lookalikes and Windows because of the Kernels in C. So, for any OS relevant for 'real' computers of the last 30 years. Had the Lisp-Machines won the battle, nobody would talk about C any more (or just to scare children like with COBOL). And don't forget about Fortran, there is some _really_ ancient Fortran code in use at the same places that still use their COBOL.