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agumonkey

Tim Sweeney of Epic Games had some thoughts on the subject

http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...

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It's funny how every single one of those features he's wanted has existed in a usable language since at least the 80's.

Hell, Ada has every single feature he wants plus more. I'm particularly fond of the range feature.

  type degrees is range 0..359;

It allows you not just to error on incompatible types, but incompatible values for your types at compile time. There's a lot more there, but I'm 100% positive it'll all be ignored by those who need it the most.

There's the productivity aspect, too - Ada projects have this habit of taking rather long :)

That was a function of the bureaucracy and legal requirements around the projects, not Ada the language.

If you legally have to have a meeting with 10 people to review and physically sign off on every line of code, your project will probably take a while.

Plus the compilers sucked in the 80's.

Well, I'd love to see a modern ADA project that did move quickly. Are there any case studies (or even OSS projects) out there?

There are quite a few open-source Ada projects, though I'm not sure how many of them qualify as quick-moving:

http://www.ohloh.net/p?sort=users&q=language%3Aada

I started to write a C++ class to write strongly-type, range-bounded integers (e.g. Fahrenheit and Celcius classes). I gave up when implementing all the operator overloads and my class was hundreds of LOC. C++ really did not to do what i wanted...

except Ada (and maybe pascal) it's something we never see, we all could use this yet it's not there. Kinda like the numerical tower of lisp systems.. anyway.

That is the real issue here. People aren't exposed to these ideas and we keep reinventing them, poorly. Worse, people don't listen to the older more experienced people until after they've already blown themselves up (often more than once).

I'm not sure how to make someone who isn't interested in learning history, learn history. Is this just a result of that our industry is entirely composed of youth?

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