Tim Holyoake

@tangerine_sedge @amoroso Oh, that's absolutely the case. It still doesn't make me feel less sour about Ada though because of all of the wasted months and opportunities we spent fighting the limitations of the language for the purposes that we tried to put it too. The road to hell is paved with good intentions I guess.

@amoroso I honestly think that's the one huge advantage the DOGS CAD system had over AutoCAD! Our parametric language was far easier to learn and implement than AutoLisp for the typical drawing office. However, guess what ... we threw that advantage away when we implemented the Ada versions of the software with a revised parametric language that was unfathomable to most!

@amoroso The company I worked for in the 80s/90s took the decision to move development of our software (CAD and engineering software) from Fortran to Ada around 1988ish. It was a disaster. The lack of good compilers (and inexpensive ones - Ada ones were around 10x more expensive than C or Fortran, a big issue when you're supporting 15+ different machine platforms and operating systems), particularly for non-UNIX computers, their general inefficiency and the way that everything operating system or graphics display dependent was thrown at non-standard pragma interfaces meant we spent more time porting software to our target hardware and debugging the vagaries of each machine than developing it or adding new functionality! (It used to take one of my engineers a couple of weeks to port and fully test our Fortran based code to new platforms - in some cases we spent months trying to get stuff to work reliably under Ada and failed completely in Microsoft PC environments). Needless to say our lunch was eaten by competitors including Autodesk and PTC, who had no such issues as they didn't adopt Ada! I think I detest the language because of that horrible experience more than I dislike Rust today, and that's saying something! My somewhat controversial view borne of experience is that the big problems in code were/are nearly always due to logic errors and differences between environments/language standards rather than the 'memory safety' bandwagon Ada and Rust adherents point to.