Re: Ada Successor Language

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Sunday, 3 June 2018 11:01:31 UTC+1, ric....@gmail.com  wrote:
> Ada is an incredible languages as it is. It doesn't need a successor - it needs more adoption.

This is half of the problem. People have an irrational hatred of the language:

1) starting from the inception of the language.
2) from being told it's bad, usually by people who've never touched it, because they were told it's bad.

It's seen as old fashioned because it uses a Wirthian-esque syntax, yet C syntax is just as old.

People are stupid, see quotes (kind of) like:

1) "I can't read it, it's too verbose," some C/C++ programmer, who can't read words but apparently can read the crap that people write in those languages.
2) "I can't read it, it needs braces," yeah, because braces are so easy to read, same as 1.
3) "It achieves safety by tedium. It's about as fun as COBOL" << actual quote

Then on top of that we have:

1) Not enough tools.
2) Not enough libs.
3) Try finding *GOOD* auto-completion for Ada in an editor.
4) There's no one place to get Ada sources from, people want an equivalent of go get and rust's cargo.
5) There's not enough people working together.
6) The commercial users of Ada, aerospace/military, don't do open source, they use it though.
7) The speed of language updates really is glacial and based mainly on what the commercial users of the language want.
8) Not enough use outside military and aerospace.

For 3 above, I hate Vi-like editors, Emacs is dog slow and auto-complete is tag based and pretty crap, imo. GPS crashes all over the place and auto complete doesn't work there either. I refuse to use web browser based editors as I don't consider them stable or good enough or fast enough and I consider them to be experimental in nature. Everything else isn't good either.

So, the choice is, imo, a new toolchain sticking to all the Ada baggage, or a new language which we can start from a blank slate and attempting to make a better Ada for this and the next century.