Ada is a language that had a lot of useful features much earlier than any of the languages that are popular today, and some of those features are still missing from the languages easily available today.
In the beginning Ada has been criticized mainly for 2 reasons, it was claimed that it is too complex and it was criticized for being too verbose.
Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada, in many cases because they have started as simpler languages to which extra features have been added later, and because the need for such features had not been anticipated during the initial language design, adding them later was difficult, increasing the complexity of the updated language.
The criticism about verbosity is correct, but it could easily be solved by preserving the abstract Ada syntax and just replacing many tokens with less verbose symbols. This can easily be done with a source preprocessor, but this is avoided in most places, because then the source programs have a non-standard appearance.
It would have been good if the Ada standard had been updated to specify an standardized abbreviated syntax besides the classic syntax. This would not have been unusual, because several old languages have specified abbreviated and non-abbreviated syntactic alternatives, including languages like IBM PL/I or ALGOL 68. Even the language C had a more verbose syntactic alternative (with trigraphs), which has almost never been used, but nonetheless all C compilers had to support both the standard syntax and its trigraph alternative.
However, the real defect of Ada has been neither complexity nor verbosity, but expensive compilers and software tools, which have ensured its replacement by the free C/C++.
The so-called complexity of Ada has always been mitigated by the fact that besides its reference specification document, Ada always had a design rationale document accompanying the language specification. The rationale explained the reasons for the choices made when designing the language.
Such a rationale document would have been extremely useful for many other programming languages, which frequently include some obscure features whose purpose is not obvious, or which look like mistakes, even if sometimes there are good reasons for their existence.
When Ada was introduced, it was marketed as a language similar to Pascal. The reason is that at that time Pascal had become the language most frequently used for teaching programming in universities.
Fortunately the resemblances between Ada and Pascal are only superficial. In reality the Ada syntax and semantics are much more similar to earlier languages like ALGOL 68 and Xerox Mesa, which were languages far superior to Pascal.
The parent article mentions that Ada includes in the language specification the handling of concurrent tasks, instead of delegating such things to a system library (task = term used by IBM since 1964 for what now is normally called "thread", a term first used in 1966 in some Multics documents and popularized much later by the Mach operating system).
However, I do not believe that this is a valuable feature of Ada. You can indeed build any concurrent applications around the Ada mechanism of task "rendez-vous", but I think that this concept is a little too high-level.
It incorporates 2 lower level actions, and for the highest efficiency in implementations sometimes it may be necessary to have access to the lowest level actions. This means that sometimes using a system library for implementing the communication between concurrent threads may provide higher performance than the built-in Ada concurrency primitives.
It's an intriguing idea. Having experience with software but almost none (only hobbyist) in hardware, I imagine it'd require a strong type system and mathematical foundation. Perhaps something like Agda, a language that is a proof assistant and theorem prover, with which one can write executable programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agda_(programming_language)
There is none as far as affine types go, even is there is a parallel to be made with limited types, but they donāt serve the same purpose.
The way Ada generally solves the same problem is by allowing much more in terms of what you can give a stack lifetime to, return from a function, and pass by parameters to functions.
It also has the regular Ā« smart pointer Ā» mechanisms that C++ and Rust also have, also with relatively crappy ergonomics
AmbientTalk did this. I used it for a demo where I dragged a mp3 player's UI button to another machine, where pressing play would play it back on the originator's speakers. Proper actor programming in the veins of E and Erlang.
I wish more people knew about the Burroughs Large Systems[0] machines. I haven't written any code for them, but I got turned-on to them by a financial Customer who ran a ClearPath Series A MCP system (and later one of the NT-based Clearpath machines with the SCAMP processor on a card) back in the late 90s, and later by a fellow contractor who did ALGOL programming for Unisys in the mid-70s and early 80s. It seems like an architecture with an uncompromising attitude toward security, and an utterly parallel universe to what the rest of the industry is (except for, perhaps, the IBM AS/400, at least in the sense of being uncompromising on design ideals).
Wonderful article and a good fit with HNās motto of āmove slowly and preserve thingsā as opposed to Silicon Valleyās jingoistic āmove fast and break thingsā.
It highlights the often perplexing human tendency to reinvent rather than reuse. Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart? In doing so, often making mistakes that could have been avoided if weād taken the time or had the curiosity/humility to learn from others. This seems particularly prevalent in software: āstanding on the feet of giantsā is a default rather than exception.
That aside, the article was thoroughly educational and enjoyable. I came away with much-deepened insight and admiration for those involved in researching, designing and building the language. Resolved to find and read the referenced āsteelmanā and language design rationale papers.
Erm, well, the comment wasnāt AI generated, it was by me - a warts and all human. The sibling comments say TFA is AI generated and Iāll be the first to admit I didnāt spot that. Still found it interesting though.
> Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart?
Humanity moves from individual to society, not the reverse.
Some knowledge moves from the plural to the singular, top to bottom, but the regular existential mode is bottom-up, which point The Famous Article (TFA) makes in the context of programming languages.
Children and ideas grow from babe to adult. They do not spring full grown from the brow of Zeus other than in myth.
Thanks, thatās helpful. My wife is a teacher and talks about knowledge being recreated, not relearned: IOW itās new to the learner even if known by the teacher. Hadnāt put those things together before.
> Every language that has added sum types in the past twenty years has added, with its own syntax, what Ada's designers put in the original standard.
While true, that doesn't mean that other language's sum types originated in Ada. As [1] states,
> NPL and Hope are notable for being the first languages with call-by-pattern evaluation and algebraic data types
and a modern language like Haskell has origins in Hope (from 1980) through Miranda.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(programming_language)
The Twitter account is from April 2026:
https://xcancel.com/Iqiipi_Essays
There is no named public author. A truly amazing productivity for such a short time period and generously the author does not take any credit.
No author because its a bot.
From the main page of this website:
"These are not positions. They are proposals ā structures through which a subject might be examined rather than verdicts about it."
The entire site is AI written.
Ada is a language that had a lot of useful features much earlier than any of the languages that are popular today, and some of those features are still missing from the languages easily available today.
In the beginning Ada has been criticized mainly for 2 reasons, it was claimed that it is too complex and it was criticized for being too verbose.
Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada, in many cases because they have started as simpler languages to which extra features have been added later, and because the need for such features had not been anticipated during the initial language design, adding them later was difficult, increasing the complexity of the updated language.
The criticism about verbosity is correct, but it could easily be solved by preserving the abstract Ada syntax and just replacing many tokens with less verbose symbols. This can easily be done with a source preprocessor, but this is avoided in most places, because then the source programs have a non-standard appearance.
It would have been good if the Ada standard had been updated to specify an standardized abbreviated syntax besides the classic syntax. This would not have been unusual, because several old languages have specified abbreviated and non-abbreviated syntactic alternatives, including languages like IBM PL/I or ALGOL 68. Even the language C had a more verbose syntactic alternative (with trigraphs), which has almost never been used, but nonetheless all C compilers had to support both the standard syntax and its trigraph alternative.
However, the real defect of Ada has been neither complexity nor verbosity, but expensive compilers and software tools, which have ensured its replacement by the free C/C++.
The so-called complexity of Ada has always been mitigated by the fact that besides its reference specification document, Ada always had a design rationale document accompanying the language specification. The rationale explained the reasons for the choices made when designing the language.
Such a rationale document would have been extremely useful for many other programming languages, which frequently include some obscure features whose purpose is not obvious, or which look like mistakes, even if sometimes there are good reasons for their existence.
When Ada was introduced, it was marketed as a language similar to Pascal. The reason is that at that time Pascal had become the language most frequently used for teaching programming in universities.
Fortunately the resemblances between Ada and Pascal are only superficial. In reality the Ada syntax and semantics are much more similar to earlier languages like ALGOL 68 and Xerox Mesa, which were languages far superior to Pascal.
The parent article mentions that Ada includes in the language specification the handling of concurrent tasks, instead of delegating such things to a system library (task = term used by IBM since 1964 for what now is normally called "thread", a term first used in 1966 in some Multics documents and popularized much later by the Mach operating system).
However, I do not believe that this is a valuable feature of Ada. You can indeed build any concurrent applications around the Ada mechanism of task "rendez-vous", but I think that this concept is a little too high-level.
It incorporates 2 lower level actions, and for the highest efficiency in implementations sometimes it may be necessary to have access to the lowest level actions. This means that sometimes using a system library for implementing the communication between concurrent threads may provide higher performance than the built-in Ada concurrency primitives.
No mention of Algol? Or Mesa?
It'd be a neat trick to have a single unified language which could bridge the gap between software and hardware description languages.
It's an intriguing idea. Having experience with software but almost none (only hobbyist) in hardware, I imagine it'd require a strong type system and mathematical foundation. Perhaps something like Agda, a language that is a proof assistant and theorem prover, with which one can write executable programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agda_(programming_language)
I am wondering what the Ada equivalent of affine types is. What is the feature that solves the problem that affine types solve in Rust.
There is none as far as affine types go, even is there is a parallel to be made with limited types, but they donāt serve the same purpose.
The way Ada generally solves the same problem is by allowing much more in terms of what you can give a stack lifetime to, return from a function, and pass by parameters to functions.
It also has the regular Ā« smart pointer Ā» mechanisms that C++ and Rust also have, also with relatively crappy ergonomics
Limited controlled types probably come closest.
https://learn.adacore.com/courses/advanced-ada/parts/resourc...
off-topic, this article has almost the same theme as dawnfox/dayfox which I love. It fits nicely with my terminal on the left. Cool stuff
The next language ought to ensure memory-safe conditions across the network.
AmbientTalk did this. I used it for a demo where I dragged a mp3 player's UI button to another machine, where pressing play would play it back on the originator's speakers. Proper actor programming in the veins of E and Erlang.
https://soft.vub.ac.be/amop/
Already exists since way back: https://github.com/mozart/mozart2 (for example)
And the answer isā¦ Rust.
Or Algol 68, which is doing a comeback.
Or even ESPOL and its evolution, NEWP, never went away, only available to Unisys customers that care about security as top deployment priority.
I wish more people knew about the Burroughs Large Systems[0] machines. I haven't written any code for them, but I got turned-on to them by a financial Customer who ran a ClearPath Series A MCP system (and later one of the NT-based Clearpath machines with the SCAMP processor on a card) back in the late 90s, and later by a fellow contractor who did ALGOL programming for Unisys in the mid-70s and early 80s. It seems like an architecture with an uncompromising attitude toward security, and an utterly parallel universe to what the rest of the industry is (except for, perhaps, the IBM AS/400, at least in the sense of being uncompromising on design ideals).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Large_Systems
Yes, IBM i and z/OS, are the other survivors.
the article states that the language can have extensions for different domains, so it is also an option.
Wonderful article and a good fit with HNās motto of āmove slowly and preserve thingsā as opposed to Silicon Valleyās jingoistic āmove fast and break thingsā.
It highlights the often perplexing human tendency to reinvent rather than reuse. Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart? In doing so, often making mistakes that could have been avoided if weād taken the time or had the curiosity/humility to learn from others. This seems particularly prevalent in software: āstanding on the feet of giantsā is a default rather than exception.
That aside, the article was thoroughly educational and enjoyable. I came away with much-deepened insight and admiration for those involved in researching, designing and building the language. Resolved to find and read the referenced āsteelmanā and language design rationale papers.
Does anyone understand how/why old HN accounts become mouthpieces for language models?
Erm, well, the comment wasnāt AI generated, it was by me - a warts and all human. The sibling comments say TFA is AI generated and Iāll be the first to admit I didnāt spot that. Still found it interesting though.
That seems uncharitable.
> Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart?
Humanity moves from individual to society, not the reverse.
Some knowledge moves from the plural to the singular, top to bottom, but the regular existential mode is bottom-up, which point The Famous Article (TFA) makes in the context of programming languages.
Children and ideas grow from babe to adult. They do not spring full grown from the brow of Zeus other than in myth.
Thanks, thatās helpful. My wife is a teacher and talks about knowledge being recreated, not relearned: IOW itās new to the learner even if known by the teacher. Hadnāt put those things together before.