On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 02:39:36PM -0500, John McKown wrote: > On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Tomasz Rola <[email protected]> wrote: > <snip> > > > > > I'm not sure if this kind of opinion matters, but after looking at > > github examples, I think the language is rather ugly. > > > > Whatever happened to Ada? > > > > Ran off with PL/I, I guess. I loved PL/I in college. And never saw it > afterwards. Ada may have been doomed by being associated with DOD and the > military. Just a guess. > > Ada is the Esperanto of computing. Beautiful and unloved.
I'm not sure if I have seen much PL/I code - perhaps I need to browse Rosetta Code again. And I'm not sure how much this will be news for people on this list, so if I am making redundant post, apologies. But here goes. It looks that fate of Ada as a former "DoD's prog lang" has been sealed for about ten years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4 http://sel4.systems/FAQ/ So, now the 5-6 years old anecdote about one contractor stating that "Ada is obsolete" makes much more sense, even though at the time I read it, it sounded rude and immoral. It doesn't really matter anymore what language will be choosen for a project - well, it may still be a problem if one prefers to write Lisp (MHO: concise, elegant) over writing Java (MHO: overly talkative and relying too much on external tools and cargo cult procedures like refactoring - I guess almost nobody writes Java in Emacs nowadays). But the source code is going to be verified in theorem proover, automatically. And even the compiler does not need to be trusted anymore, because one can compare exec file with source and prove that one matches another. Of course, I may be sceptical still. There are limits to automatic proofs, either proover's performance is insufficient or Goedel rises his ugly head. But it seems that whatever advantages Ada once had, they will be irrelevant except for smaller players, small businesses, hobbyists and the like. Please note, I have no connection to those things, those 3-4 letters. I only read as much as I can. I don't even know Haskell too much, except I read enough tutorial to decide I want OCaml (but then I didn't learn it either). Ada has just got lower on my todo/tolearn list, unfortunately. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
