On Jan 8, 2008 10:15 AM, Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What would be the practical implications of learning a language such as Ada?
The practical implication of learning Ada would be that you'd know Ada. From what I understand, there are still a lot of government contract jobs for Ada programming, doing stuff like aircraft avionics and the like. I imagine it's a very different development environment than most of us are used to. It's also used elsewhere in the embedded industry, especially where safety is a large concern, since safety and correctness are what it emphasizes. If you learned it well, you could probably get a job writing in it, though some EE background would probably help as well. > I've wanted to learn some of these more obscure languages for well > over a decade, but you'ld be hard pressed to a find a book that > teaches application development in Lisp, Ada, COBOL, Fortran, or > pretty much any language which predates ANSI C. I haven't had any trouble finding resources to learn Common Lisp or Scheme. There are great books available for free online. For Common Lisp, here is a non-exhaustive list: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Here are some for Scheme: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html http://www.scheme.com/tspl2d/ http://www.htdp.org/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ And for Ada: http://adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=BooksOnLine&Title=Ada+Books+On-Line For Forth: http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ Fortran: http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/fortranbook.html Basically, google "<language name> book" and click some links. If you need hardcopies, those that have been published and aren't too long out of print should have copies available through online used bookstores. Otherwise, see your favorite print/copy shop. > I would LOVE to learn these languages, but alas the only one I've had > any success with is LISP and thats only because AutoCAD still uses it > and there were a ton of example applications to learn from, even then > though they were limited to the AutoCAD dialect of LISP which I > understand isn't really LISP either. Even with that said, I am still > a complete noob with LISP. >From what I understand, AutoCAD's version of Lisp is a particular weak one, as far as Lispiness goes. Better to learn Common Lisp or Scheme if you want to write real programs. And yes, you can write real programs with either of them. :P --Levi /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
