I like this sarcastic piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20180207161304/http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-04.html https://web.archive.o

I like this sarcastic piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20180207161304/http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-04.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180207161304/http://home.pipel... > After a number of top-secret meetings at the highest levels, the "Ada Project" was conceived. ... Its goal was to divert Soviet attention from truly productive computer languages like Lisp, and convince them that only a bloated, grossly inefficient, high order compiled language along the lines of PL/I could be reasonably utilized in the deployment of military embedded systems. The use of a standardized, inefficient language would provide a one-two punch: it would render super-programmers useless, and it would increase the demands on hardware by more than two orders of magnitude. > The Ada Project was inspired by the unexpected success of the IBM System/360 architecture behind the Iron Curtain. The Ada Project's wizards {the Ada Project was conceived at Kirtland AFB, NM, near Roswell} reasoned that if the Soviets could be lured into copying the 360 architecture, they could also be lured into copying the Ada language, and if this language were fiendishly designed to make real-time systems essentially impossible to program, then the Soviet military machine would grind to a halt. > Although Ada would also severely impact American software productivity, it was felt that--just as cancer-fighting chemotherapy nearly kills healthy tissue while it kills tumors--the healthier US economy would be better able to bear the severe burden of an unproductive software industry than the Soviet economy could. Thus, while American geeks were inferior to Soviet geeks, our Elbonian hordes could beat their Mongolian hordes. Presumably modern Ada is better! Even the sarcastic paper hints at it: > Now that the Wicked Witch of the East is dead, the wizards have finally allowed Ada to evolve into Ada9X, which fixed some of Ada's more egregious dysfunctions. However, even today the brilliance of Ada's original conception still shines brightly through.