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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
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Subject: Re: Ada Successor Language
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2018 12:37:33 -0700
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Date: 2018-06-03T12:37:33-07:00
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Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com> writes:
> It's seen as old fashioned because it uses a Wirthian-esque syntax,
> yet C syntax is just as old.

It has Algol-esque syntax and Algol's best known dialect was from 1960.
C is nowhere near that old.  More cogently C's syntax displaced
Algol/Pascal syntax because people liked its conciseness.

> 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.

"Verbose" to me refers to the total amount of code you have to write to
get something done, rather than localized begin-vs-curly differences.
It does seem to me that you need more code in Ada than in other
languages.  Looking at examples on Rosetta code bears this out.

I looked at the docs for Ada's priority queues with the idea of fixing
the Rosetta example about Hamming numbers, but it started to look like a
huge project, compared with the Python heapq-based example that I wrote
in about 5 minutes.  The Corporate Bullshit Sentence Generator that I
looked at a few weeks ago (while a fun program) also seemed very
verbose, with its 500 different random number generation functions and
supporting datatypes.  

> 6) The commercial users of Ada, aerospace/military, don't do open
> source, they use it though.

I thought Ada was losing ground even in those areas.