Lately, in university, I've done a few pieces of homework in Ada (the first ISO OOP language ever), and I've had a few thoughts.
Mainly along the line of: Why on earth isn't this language more popular? It just feels so good to program in, with the mixture of rigidity and flexibility in where you can declare variables, structures, or functions (needs to be in a declaration block, but these blocks can be opened pretty much anywhere), and the fact that threads are first-class citizens. Sure, it uses Pascal-like syntax, which is often annoyingly verbose, but I've actually found this a lot less annoying than the nonsense that is the entirety of Python, or Javascript.
2 years ago
While I haven't worked in Ada, I think many of it's ideas are slowly being found in other static/compiled languages.
I think that the evolution of programming languages has gone two ways:
1) super dynamic languages like python and JS which are great for knocking together small scripts in. These languages are getting more flexible.
2) rigid languages like ada and rust which turn as much as possible into compile-time checks. These languages are growing more safe.
My language of choice at the momemt is Rust which has memory mutability as a core language concept. It's a cool re-think of avoiding manual memory management in a non-garbage-collected language. · 2 years ago
In fact, for my most recent pieces of homework, I've found myself wishing I was using it intstead of C, which I wouldn't have believed was possible. · 2 years ago