Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ameoba 4401 days ago
Why Ada Isn't Popular (2014) : Everyone outside the DoD wrote it off as dead in 1998.
1 comments

Not just DoD (though, admittedly, there are a large number of military projects in this list):

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html

Sadly, the DoD doesn't require Ada anymore and many software failures can be attributed to bugs that Ada would have caught at compile time. If I were doing flight control software it would probably be Ada checked with Agda.
I know, it's frustrating.

My previous employer chose C over Ada for all their projects, and they paid for it when you looked at the overruns and additional moneys spent on testing and analysis tools that Ada provides as a language feature.

Ada-based languages (such as SPARK) are still used in developing modern aviation systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

It would be interesting to have a version of SPIN [0] using this. This [1] looks really fresh. And I love the idea of creating new languages out of a subset. Almost all teams create an ad hoc language subset, formalizing it can be really powerful.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPIN_(operating_system)

[1] http://www.spark-2014.org/about/

Hah! This brings back memories as in 1998 I had Professor Feldman as a CS freshman at GWU. And, you guessed it, we learned Ada as our first language.

The main thing I remember is that it was very annoying to be fixing indentation issues on a terminal text editor, although learning about packages was very cool. Irrationally, the indentation strictness annoys me in modern languages like Python, too :) that, and using := instead of = felt like a waste!