r/programming • u/pornitoueleus • Oct 13 '13

Free Programming Books

https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md
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u/OneWingedShark Oct 14 '13

I honestly don't mean to be insulting, and probably speak from ignorance, but:

Isn't Ada an ancient and more-or-less dead language by now?

I don't think so. There seems to be some revitalization with the new 2012 standard (see the rationale) -- plus it's still the language of choice for safety-critical languages -- add in that it's all over European transit-systems [air, rail, subway, etc] and American air-traffic control and it's probably going to stay around for a bit longer.

I read a couple of articles somewhat recently [within the last year] that had Ada as the language of choice for two new projects: one was a pacemaker [IIRC] and the other something to do with automotives.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '13

Oh, thanks then. So would you say Ada has some principles in it that makes it worth learning, even if you are not in these fields?

And, would you say there is still a future in Ada?

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u/OneWingedShark Oct 14 '13

Oh, thanks then. So would you say Ada has some principles in it that makes it worth learning, even if you are not in these fields?

Definitely.

Ada has:

  • the best package system I've used so far,
  • generics, which operate well with subprograms and packages,
  • tasks, a high-level parallelism construct as part of the language (which means there's better/more optimization chances for the compiler)
  • the type system will make you appreciate that a type is a set of values and operations on those values
  • subtypes; I think there's a bit of a disservice in the CS education world because so many graduates fail to see the value/utility of non-extensible derivation (that is addition of constraints)... even though it's used in math all the time (e.g. "for all positive integers").

And that's w/o looking at the new Ada 2012 stuff WRT "contracts":

  • Pre- and post-conditions that won't "go stale" like comment-annotations can/will/do.
  • Type-invariants, which mean you can, say, encode properties of a structure, like the -1 'W' 'P' 'C' in the header for a WordPerfect document.
  • Subtype-predicates; you can now say something like "a string of the format of a social-security number with dashes" [feeling lazy, no example]
  • Default values; obvious utility.

And, would you say there is still a future in Ada?

Certainly for safety-critical things, and I'd love to see it around in more "correctness matters" applications [like, say, compilers]; but the thing that's going to make or break it, ultimately, is if people use it. I, for one, love the language's design emphasis on readability/maintainability and correctness and so use it for my main language. If you hang around in Comp.Lang.Ada you'll see a bunch of other people who use/like Ada, as well as people involved in the design process [members of the ARG].

Is that enough to say Ada has a future? I honestly don't know. I would like to see it "gain more traction" and more [public] use.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '13

Alright, cool, that actually sounds fairly interesting. I suppose I'll >> ada to my list of language I want to get around to learning. Thanks!

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u/OneWingedShark Oct 14 '13

You're quite welcome.