Ada, Past Present and Future
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it in Ada discussions, including for Dewar's remark on how much costlier bugs are when found late.
What it is
An AdaCore talk on the history, present and future of the Ada language, including remarks from Robert Dewar. The title and description say little else.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends feelin_googley · 2018-03 · on “Is Ada a failed language?”
Heres a lecture at MIT about Ada from a favorite programmer of mine. [this video] I do not understand the Medium authors definition of "success". I get similarly confused when web commentators use the term "won" (e.g., language X "won") when discussing programming languages. Won what? IMO, the presenter (RIP) was quite successful. Im sure Ada "won" many contracts.
Cites ajxs · 2019-04 · on “Haskell, Ada, C++: An Experiment in Prototyping Productivity (1994) [pdf]”
I believe it was Dr Robert Dewar of AdaCore fame who I first heard remark that ( paraphrased ) every time a bug gets missed at a stage of development ( compile-time to alpha, to beta, to production, etc ) the cost of it's resolution increases by an order of magnitude. I'm certainly by no means dismissing the value of concise languages for expressing ideas fluently, but brevity and expressiveness are only two factors influencing the value of a programming language in a specific domain. It's definitely an interesting paper, every time I see it I can't help but think that it's a little disingenuous to conduct an apples to oranges comparison of languages on these particular merits. It's much mor