4 ms·

I'm not a big fan of TIOBE [1], but Ada is in the top 20 and ranks above Lua, Go, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Scheme, Ocaml, Erlang, and a bunch of others that get

I'm not a big fan of TIOBE [1], but Ada is in the top 20 and ranks above Lua, Go, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Scheme, Ocaml, Erlang, and a bunch of others that get more mention here. If an article called Haskell or Go "mainstream" would you have called them out on it? Ada is still popular in a lot of fields. I don't get the hate on Ada. It has built in tasks/threading, strong typing, low level access when you need it, generics, native compilation, a decent toolchain, an open standard, ... [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

aswanson 14y ago
I think the hate is rooted in it's association withthe DOD in the United States. The military ised to demand it's usage on projects.
roedog 14y ago
I've heard complaints about how tough it was to get ADA code to compile. I'm not sure if it was the language itself, or unfriendly tools and compiler warnings...
- lbrandy 14y ago
  That's a feature. Ada is a fairly strict language that allows for compilers to do a tremendous amount of static checks.
  - koenigdavidmj 14y ago
    It has been said that this is the character of programming in Ada: if you can get the damn thing to compile, it works perfectly.
Nelson69 14y ago
I think it was sort of a perfect storm of a couple things. General dislike of mandates, especially from the DoD. It's Pascal like syntax. In the 80's there was a very real Pascal vs. C war, literally based upon "BEGIN" and "END" being too verbose compared to "{" and "}" argued by guys with 300bps modems and crap like that. Pascal got an unfair bad rap. Ada looks an awful lot like it though. Then C, especially old school C can almost be converted into assembly by YACC without a real compiler. While it's very hard to make a good or great C compiler, it's not hard to just make a C compiler. Ada came with a much larger library and then, if I'm not mistaken, there was a certification process to make sure your Ada was really "Ada" and that was fairly pricey. It's worth a look if you're doing some kinds of green field development, the GNU Ada compiler is pretty good. I think there was a plan for like an eclipse plugin too.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  Pascal's bad rap was entirely justified. You could not write a useful program in Wirth's Pascal - a lot of language extensions were required, and of course every Pascal vendor implemented their own such extensions. Ada suffered for years for being an unimplementable language. It was a long time before compiler technology caught up with it, but Ada found it hard to shake that stigma. C came along at the right time, did not have those problems, and so took off. On the PC, for example, in the early days C was the only possibility other than assembler.
  - mulander 14y ago
    > Ada suffered for years for being an unimplementable language. It was a long time before compiler technology caught up with it Could you explain what features of the language made it that hard to implement? I would really like to see your general opinion on Ada from a language designer standpoint. Considering you're the main mind behind D - did you draw any inspiration from Ada while fleshing out the language?
    - WalterBright 14y ago
      I first got and read the spec for Ada in 1982, intending to write a compiler for it. I found it to be overwhelmingly complicated, but I had little experience with compilers at the time. I haven't paid much attention to it since. Many other early compiler devs shared my opinion of it, and indeed it was many years before it was successfully implemented. I don't recall just what it was that made it hard, other than being so complicated. I doubt I'd feel the same way looking at it now, as I have a lot of practice implementing complex features from writing a C++ compiler :-) What I find attractive about Ada is the emphasis on writing programs that are checkably correct. I believe that, with the ever increasing complexity of software, better and much more mechanically checkable encapsulation, etc., is the way of the future, as opposed to what I call "faith based programming" where you overly rely on the programmer not making mistakes. A large focus of D has been and continues to be on being able to write mechanically checkable code.
- gaius 14y ago

aswanson 14y ago

I think the hate is rooted in it's association withthe DOD in the United States. The military ised to demand it's usage on projects.

roedog 14y ago

I've heard complaints about how tough it was to get ADA code to compile. I'm not sure if it was the language itself, or unfriendly tools and compiler warnings...

lbrandy 14y ago
That's a feature. Ada is a fairly strict language that allows for compilers to do a tremendous amount of static checks.
- koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  It has been said that this is the character of programming in Ada: if you can get the damn thing to compile, it works perfectly.

Nelson69 14y ago

I think it was sort of a perfect storm of a couple things. General dislike of mandates, especially from the DoD. It's Pascal like syntax. In the 80's there was a very real Pascal vs. C war, literally based upon "BEGIN" and "END" being too verbose compared to "{" and "}" argued by guys with 300bps modems and crap like that. Pascal got an unfair bad rap. Ada looks an awful lot like it though. Then C, especially old school C can almost be converted into assembly by YACC without a real compiler. While it's very hard to make a good or great C compiler, it's not hard to just make a C compiler. Ada came with a much larger library and then, if I'm not mistaken, there was a certification process to make sure your Ada was really "Ada" and that was fairly pricey. It's worth a look if you're doing some kinds of green field development, the GNU Ada compiler is pretty good. I think there was a plan for like an eclipse plugin too.

WalterBright 14y ago
Pascal's bad rap was entirely justified. You could not write a useful program in Wirth's Pascal - a lot of language extensions were required, and of course every Pascal vendor implemented their own such extensions. Ada suffered for years for being an unimplementable language. It was a long time before compiler technology caught up with it, but Ada found it hard to shake that stigma. C came along at the right time, did not have those problems, and so took off. On the PC, for example, in the early days C was the only possibility other than assembler.
- mulander 14y ago
  > Ada suffered for years for being an unimplementable language. It was a long time before compiler technology caught up with it Could you explain what features of the language made it that hard to implement? I would really like to see your general opinion on Ada from a language designer standpoint. Considering you're the main mind behind D - did you draw any inspiration from Ada while fleshing out the language?
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    I first got and read the spec for Ada in 1982, intending to write a compiler for it. I found it to be overwhelmingly complicated, but I had little experience with compilers at the time. I haven't paid much attention to it since. Many other early compiler devs shared my opinion of it, and indeed it was many years before it was successfully implemented. I don't recall just what it was that made it hard, other than being so complicated. I doubt I'd feel the same way looking at it now, as I have a lot of practice implementing complex features from writing a C++ compiler :-) What I find attractive about Ada is the emphasis on writing programs that are checkably correct. I believe that, with the ever increasing complexity of software, better and much more mechanically checkable encapsulation, etc., is the way of the future, as opposed to what I call "faith based programming" where you overly rely on the programmer not making mistakes. A large focus of D has been and continues to be on being able to write mechanically checkable code.
gaius 14y ago