Post #1283112
2026-04-17 11:14 UTC
Replies (14)
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@whyrl@furry.engineer 2026-04-17 12:01
@bsdphk Well that's thoroughly depressing. All this time, we could have had nice things, but because modern language designers ignored Ada, our industry is still full of cowboys stuck in the wild west.
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@darrenmoffat@mastodon.social 2026-04-17 12:29
@bsdphk I spent the summer of my graduation year in 1995 teaching myself more Ada (we had done a little in my comp sci course) and working on the GHC Haskell compiler- I was sure both of those languages would be important. But I’ve spent the majority of my career writing OS level code in C, debugging at the asm level and scripting in shell and Python. It is sad that Ada hasn’t been more popular outside of the traditional safety critical systems domain.
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@Stefan_S_from_H@mastodon.social 2026-04-17 13:12
@bsdphk funny that the first thought I have when reading about Ada is the Ariane 5 crash.
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@EdBruce@infosec.exchange 2026-04-17 13:17
@bsdphk Loved using Ada in the 80s, but all the C bros convinced everyone that Ada was too slow. Real world testing only showed about a 2-3% advantage to C. Until you forced the C coders to put in all the range checks, etc. that Ada provided, then it was a different story.
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@MartyFouts@mastodon.online 2026-04-17 13:35
@bsdphk Dijkstra is rolling in his grave and I can’t stop giggling. I have to admit that I never thought I would see anyone attempt to salvage Ada’s reputation after the way it imploded at the DOD. Thanks for sharing.
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@goblin@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-17 13:43
@bsdphk I'm far too young to have experienced it myself in person, but to my understanding all these cool features introduced a complexity which was hard to manage in the 80s. Unfortunately I'm drawing a blank on my source, sorry about that, it's a couple of years since I've learned a bit of Ada (because these features *are* cool and ought to be available *today*). Also capitalism happens, I guess the availability of a DoD language was less than stellar, and if it was available, it was probably really expensive? This is a side-effect of all these certification-heavy domains I know, stuff is *really* expensive. Also, the wider industry tends to value development speed over anything, lest the adoption of all those dynamic languages. Just another way of externalizing costs to the public.
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@a2800276@social.cologne 2026-04-17 14:34
@bsdphk Thanks! Great read. I've added Steelman and Rationale documents to my "have a look at"-list...
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@dpk@chaos.social 2026-04-17 14:54
@bsdphk @krans I want to see this guy and the GNU Algol 68 guy go head to head in an argument
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@nuthatch@infosec.exchange 2026-04-17 15:31
@bsdphk terrific essay. It would be nice if posts included dates. This looks from the footnotes to be 2024. Would also like to see more discussion of Swift. And who is this person anyway!?
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@tael@yiff.life 2026-04-17 15:40
@bsdphk the opposite of typescript in every way
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@jackeric@beige.party 2026-04-17 18:01
@bsdphk what railway signalling systems had software failures? they're tested to hell and back. do they mean commercial failure, where a system could not be implemented sufficiently quickly?
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@Dhmspector@mastodon.social 2026-04-17 18:17
@bsdphk lots of memories — I was a systems programmer at NYU’s Courant Institute in the early 80s which produced the first working, validated Ada compiler and worked in support of that project (Ed Schonberg & Robert Dewar were the project leads/PIs). It’s true that what’s old is new again…so many fundamental things keep getting reinvented. The old saw holds: “in other disciplines we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, in CS we stand on the toes of those who came before us.”
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@swannodette@mas.to 2026-04-17 18:52
@bsdphk this reads like pure AI slop BTW. Too much hand waving and inaccuracies. Looking at the top level just confirms the sloppiness https://www.iqiipi.com
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@robpike@hachyderm.io 2026-04-17 21:36
@bsdphk There's a lot of, to put it politely, inaccuracy in that piece. Also it's clearly generated with or by AI. But this is the world we're in now, so get used to it. History being rewritten by the machines.