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Comment by rustyconover | Hacker News Reader

Ada was the first language they threw at us in university back in '98. At the time, it felt like learning Latin to become a poet, but looking back, those lessons—rigor, clarity, and discipline—have aged better than some modern frameworks. Ada may not trend on GitHub, but it quietly shaped a generation of better programmers.

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Indeed. As a concrete example of one of those things Ada gets very right, it breaks down object-oriented programming into separate features of

- encapsulation,

- reuse,

- inheritance, and

- dynamic dispatch.

In Ada, you can opt into each of those things separately, depending on what you need “object-oriented programming” for. This is in big contrast to Java, where you type the keyword “class” and then all of that comes along for the ride.

I never truly understood OOP until I worked a bit with Ada.

Do you have some examples of this? Sounds interesting. But unsure what is different to plain composition approaches?

See https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/obje...

If other languages just had the wonderful package and package body, they would have solved many or even most of my problems.

I believe for the same reasons that Latin helps develop a foundation in language, the people who designed it were looking at the problem from many different levels all at the same time. The first language I encountered with split behavioral / code components was Mesa at Xerox, and then Modula 2. (later VHDL but that's different?)

I think at the other end are lisp/forth list/stack languages which made this particular crate: https://github.com/BrentSeidel/Ada-Lisp-Embedded/tree/main/s... getting an award interesting to me. The combination of the two languages has an expressibility that individually they don't possess.

I’m not sure whether to agree or disagree with this perspective/analogy. On the one hand, Latin declinations prepare one for a wide variety of languages as diverse as English, French, and Russian, on the other hand the Roman Republic/Empire had such a wide influence - supposedly a third of the global population at its peak - that it’s hard to extricate the path dependency from the true influence of Romance languages.

There’s so much cross pollination in programming languages that I’m not sure where to draw the line. Even trying to probably isn’t worth the effort.

> a wide variety of languages as diverse as English, French, and Russian

As a linguist this makes me despair. These are all Indo-European languages, and not very exotic ones at that. It's like "as diverse as white, off-white, ivory, and bone." There are so many languages which would stretch your brain more.

I loved Latin back in the day, and Greek, but if you want exotic Indo-European languages, try Welsh or Old Irish. And if you want really exotic languages, leave Indo-European altogether. If you want to stick to Europe, try Basque, Finnish, or Hungarian. If you're willing to stretch your legs, try Seneca or Yindjibarndi. Swahili isn't too difficult, but it's very, very different from Latin. Hell, try Mandarin, though non-alphabetic writing systems kill my interest. Too much work on what I regard as a side point. If you want to make your brain explode (and who doesn't?), look into the Khoisan languages. Go here and listen to the speech sample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ju%C7%80%CA%BChoan_language

Amazing.

> As a linguist this makes me despair.

Why in god’s green earth would a random HN comment make you do that? I’m not a linguist and I have very limited experience beyond Indo-European languages, just like I have very limited experience with languages like Brainfuck or Ada - each of which might as well be as foreign to me as Mandarin or Swahili. I just didn’t bother to add that addendum because it would otherwise be a ten thousand word comment.

Laymen will be laymen. To despair over that is a path to nothing but torment.

Bro come on

Oh yes I'm screenshotting this for the textbook

What kind of programs did they teach you to write in the language?

I'll believe it when I see it. This smells like boarding-school braggadocio.

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