Dijkstra on Ada
16 comments
·May 22, 2025rini17
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Ygg2
> And it's no more verbose than Java anyway.
That's damning with faint praise. Java is one of the most verbose languages.
> Rust, sadly, seem to be bound to end likewise as the rustaceans enthusiastically endorse AI-driven rewriting of legacy DoD C code into Rust.
Sure, some people want to speed up and/or automate conversion C to Rust, they are a minority. Going for 1 to 1 translation is going to be problem fraught with issues.
phtrivier
I wish the author had provided a link to the full reviews - I suspect they were more substantial.
As a aside : let's thank the FSM that Dijkstra never had access to social media - I suspect he had the kind of "abrasive" personality that would have made him probe to wasting his time and intellect arguing with all the randos of the world.
blablablerg
And you don't think he would adjust like Linus for example?
enriquto
maybe. But that would be so sad! (as it is with Linus)
aaron695
[dead]
mcv
The guy certainly had a brutal way with words.
ggm
I have it in my mind that Wirth floated modula/modula-2 variants into the early round of Ada candidates but I can find nothing evident.
My back reasoning to it's truth is threefold:
1) He did a residency at York university relating to pascal and modula in teaching CS. That's why my first uni language was pascal. (He'd just left)
2) York used pascal and modula heavily across the Ada specification window
3) York got an SERC or other funding contract to implement a multi pass Ada compiler on BSD Unix.
Which would mean (if true) Dijkstra's comments basically slated all of the candidate languages, and by implication Wirths language views, given he'd worked on the IFIP programming language specification process and was so strongly associated with pascal variants of imperative programming languages.
zombot
I can't make heads or tails of this.
erk__
A better article that is actually about the competition is this one which was on HN the other day: https://iment.com/maida/computer/redref/
f1shy
Does somebody have more context about it? What were the other colors? This says absolutely nothing to me.
amszmidt
> What were the other colors?
ADA was designed around a competition between four companies, to make it unbiased the proposals got named by colour.
Honeywell was Green, Intermetrics was Red, SofTech was Blue, and SRI was Yellow. There where no other colors.
hello_computer
Did Dijkstra have anything nice to say about anything?
Surac
That settles it for now and forever. Men are only able to distinguish 6 colors.
The actual modern Ada ended up being reasonable and the conservative design is justified. And it's no more verbose than Java anyway. Is there any writeup on the discrepance between the hysteria and the real thing?
I think it was blowback to the hype. Rust, sadly, seem to be bound to end likewise as the rustaceans enthusiastically endorse AI-driven rewriting of legacy DoD C code into Rust. What can go wrong there?