The Quiet Colossus
owl writes:
https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html
On Ada, the language that the Department of Defense built, the industry ignored, and every modern language quietly became
There is a language that made generics a first-class, standardised feature of a widely deployed systems language, formalised the package, built concurrency into the specification rather than the library, mandated the separation of interface from implementation, and introduced range-constrained types, discriminated unions, and a model of task communication that Go would arrive at, independently and by a different route, thirty years later. Successive revisions added protected objects, compile-time null exclusion, and language-level contracts. It is a language that Rust spent a decade converging toward from one direction while Python converged toward it from another, and that C# has been approximating, feature by feature, for the better part of two decades. It is a language that the industry has consistently described as verbose, arcane, and irrelevant. It is also, with a directness that embarrasses the usual story of software progress, the language that anticipated - with unusual precision - the safety features every modern language is now trying to acquire.
Ada is not famous. It is not the subject of enthusiastic conference talks or breathless blog posts. It does not have a charismatic founder who gives keynotes about the philosophy of programming, and it does not have a community that writes frameworks or publishes packages with clever names. What it has is a formal standard that has been revised four times since 1983; a presence in the software of many major commercial aircraft and avionics systems; a set of design decisions made under government contract in the late 1970s that the rest of the industry has spent forty years independently rediscovering; and a reputation, among the programmers who know it at all, as the language that says no - the language whose compiler enforces legality, visibility, typing, and a degree of safety checking that most languages leave to convention or tooling, that makes the programmer name what they mean, that treats ambiguity as an error rather than a feature. These qualities were, for a long time, considered its weaknesses. They are, on examination, the precise qualities that every language currently described as modern is attempting to acquire.
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