Re: Ada Successor Language

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 5:01:31 AM UTC-5, ric....@gmail.com wrote:
> Ada is an incredible languages as it is. It doesn't need a successor - it needs more adoption.

I actually agree with this for the most part.  Ada needs another compiler (or at least one of its few compiler vendors to market themselves differently) more than it needs a successor language.

The only way that Ada needs a successor is a minor variant that explores language changes that the ARG doesn't pursue, mostly in the category of great ideas that would break backwards compatibility on arcane topics.  But the chance that a successor to Ada would restrain itself to strictly being a minor variant is low, which is almost too much risk.

Conversely, what has cemented the view that C-family syntax is more readable than Pascal-family syntax is that there are a plethora of C-syntaxed cousin and sibling languages to C.  Ada looks like it is dead-end evolutionary branch.  Evolutionarily-dead-end Ada could have been named:  Duckbilled Platypus, Dodobird, Coelacanth.  Among these Coelacanth is best:  thought by many to be extinct, but still occasionally found in the wild.

What would be healthy for Ada is a new compiler whose front end is implemented as a honey pot to attract researchers to experiment with new variants of Ada, as they vaunt their researcwares as The Next Big Thing with much energy and fanfare.  Imagine someone even experimenting with •exactly• same Ada that we have today but with strictly one topic changed, either:

1) an entirely different memory model than Ada has today in its storage pools (or should I say, entirely different than the cattle chute that compilers & standard-library sends us down today);

or
2) an entirely different C-symbol cryptosyntax;

or
3) multimethods built-in;

or
4) some logic programming other than SPARK;

or
5) multistage programming source-code generation (instead of a preprocessor);

or
6) overt choice of different Ichbiah/Ada83 or Taft/Ada95 or Randy/Ada2020 or Rust-esque correctness enforcement;

or
7) a hundred other experiments.

Hence, the idea earlier in this thread for an Alphard-esque-on-steroids or Seed7-esque-on-steroids hypoAda on which today's Ada8652* can be implemented atop but also on which syntactic or semantic variants can be easily derived.  LLVM is an analogous honeypot for research on the backend.  Likewise, hypoAda could be another honeypot intentionally designed to attract researchers to fan the flames of energy among the universities (again) and among the tech billionaires (for the first time) regarding Ada.

* Ada8652 is all of the ISO 8652 eras:  Ada83, Ada95, Ada2005, Ada2012, Ada2020, …