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when i was first exposed to ada, early 1990's, the language was unusable. compile times where excessive (like hours). machines of that era were slow and had s
by bdavis__ 5y ago
when i was first exposed to ada, early 1990's, the language was unusable. compile times where excessive (like hours). machines of that era were slow and had small memories (4MB was a common size, and more than 1 CPU was a luxury).
i must also admit, ada was hard. you had to do some mojo just to print out a value ("package int_io is new integer_io blah, blah). it had a standard of a couple of hundred pages that you kept on your desk. and you looked at it on a regular basis. and the compiler was picky (strongly typed).
companies dropped ada because they couldn't hire. C++ people were more available.
my opinion today is ada is relatively small, makes very fast code, and supports all the programming paradigms of C++ in a very sane way.
if the first ada compiler was "ada95" instead of "ada83", it would be very popular. it came out a decade before the world was ready.
- pyjarrett 5y agoAda 2012 is what I learned, but I probably would have moved on if had learned Ada 95. They've done a fantastic job modernizing it, and the next version looks even better (Ada 2022). > my opinion today is ada is relatively small, makes very fast code, and supports all the programming paradigms of C++ in a very sane way. This is why I've been sticking with it. I also get pre/post conditions, a real module system (yes, I know C++20), and bounds checked arrays/strings. Easy built-in multitasking has me using concurrency a lot more often as well. > companies dropped ada because they couldn't hire. C++ people were more available. I work professionally in C++, and honestly think you could convert a C++ programmer into an Ada one in about a month or so, due to the conceptual similarities.
- bdavis__ 5y agoagreed. on all points.