An essay on why the Ada programming language was ahead of its time and why its influence is largely unacknowledged.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

An essay on why the Ada programming language was ahead of its time and why its influence is largely unacknowledged.

https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html

#ada #retrocomputing

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@amoroso That is a bizarrely long essay to not mention Algol at all.

Java, Scheme, Smalltalk, C++, Objective-C all learned a LOT from Algol60/68 (the useful parts from 60, idealistic things that don't work from 68).

Hoping that your compiler will protect you from other packages, in a binary run by the programmer, is obviousy folly. Packages are tinsel locks for politeness.

Pascal & Modula-2 came out of Algol60, & Ada's the weird government contract version of that conversation.
#ada #algol

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mdhughes In the essay it's remarkable the absence of Modula-2, the early work on which predated or was contemporary of Ada's.

[mhd@tilde.zone]

@amoroso @mdhughes Xerox' Mesa would also be an interesting point of view, as it was both an ancestor of Modula and a competitor of what became Ada.

[mhd@tilde.zone]

@amoroso @mdhughes In general, the Algol family had some Game of Thrones like drama (and even more incest).

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@mhd @amoroso Oh, yeah, all the early language designs were catty academic politics at best, but the whole "working out module/class/simulation" thing was extra back-stabby.

Committees, it turns out, are a bad idea.

[monospace@floss.social]

@amoroso Ada is not retrocomputing!

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@monospace You have a point I tagged it that way mostly for the historical context of the essay.

[tfb@functional.cafe]

@mdhughes @amoroso Honestly, I think that's a terrible article. Anyone who doesn't already understand how intertwined Ada is with the Wirth languages would come away no wiser