Make it Simple: A Tale about Robert Dewar (2015)

I think it is worth mentioning that this was Robert Dewar's second or third Ada implementation (depending on how you want to count them). Robert was involved with the original Ada/Ed implementation from the late 1970s/early 1980s at NYU (targeting VAX minicomputers), and the re-implementation of that into a C-based implementation that ran on MS-DOS. Ada/Ed was the first validated Ada implementation, and it used SETL as its implementation language which Robert was actively involved in through the 1970s (so he had a long track record of language implementations).

What we are missing about the Ada story is the long line of languages and tools that inspired the Green design that lead to Ada, that is the language LIS (Pascal/Simula inspired) and its toolchain that Jean Ichbiah and associates used as inspiration for the Ada design.

For programming skill, I hold Dewar in similar regard to Arthur Whitney and djb. I still enjoy using Spitbol for writing lexers. MINIMAL, the portable assembly language used in Spitbol, is far more interesting than today's popular programming languages, IMHO.

https://github.com/spitbol/x64/raw/master/sbl.min

https://github.com/hardbol/spitbol/raw/master/docs/minimal-r...

This reminds me of a recent podcast episode from Hidden Brain about the power of subtraction. Removing things or taking things away is a path to improvement that we rarely consider, to our own detriment.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/do-less/

Hi, I'm the author. Thanks to the person who proposed this on HN! Ask me anything.

I hadn't heard of the example of rms' technical insight there, which is interesting. Not knowing enough about Ada, I wonder how the specification and implementation compare with Fortran 90 modules.