Kevin Chadwick via Dng said on Tue, 28 May 2024 23:18:09 +0100
(GMT+01:00)


>I would be interested in what you think about Ada. There is certainly
>a fair amount to learn especially with a full runtime instead of the
>Ada light runtime but it is also rather sensible and designed to be
>easy to read and to reduce maintenance costs. I would hope we can all
>agree that C does no favours to the Linux kernels maintainability and
>I am not sure that Rust is going to help with that. It may even make
>things more opaque.
>
>"https://learn.adacore.com"

I skimmed some of the early pages of
https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada and so far it seems
like a nice language inspired by Niklaus Wirth.

It's sad I didn't learn it in the 1980's when it could have made me
some money, but back then there was no Linux with every language you
could imagine so that you could learn at home. To learn Ada, you had to
be lucky enough to get an entry level Ada job, and that was hard to do,
especially for a guy who couldn't have gotten a security clearance.

I like the Ada philosophy of clarity over conciseness. That was a very
unhip thing to say back in the days when everyone was dissing Cobol.

The value of Ada today, at least to me, involves the answers to these
questions:

* Can Ada easily interface with databases?
* Does Ada have a reasonably easy way to output GUI?
* Does Ada have a reasonably easy way to run a web application without
using CGI or some sort of browser or server addon?

Following along with the hello world I find there's no available
gprbuild command, so that's right away a monkey wrench in the wheel.

But it looks like a good language.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21