Comment by kevlar700
2 months ago
Loving Ada without using exceptions or inheritance on embedded and desktop. Some love Ada full OOP tagged types. I love Ada procedural style with privacy and abstract data types. I wish Flutter was written in Ada but atleast Dart is better than JavaScript atleast for procedural code without it's oop boiler plate. You don't actually need OOP for widgets.
I'm a big fan of Ada. I first encountered exceptions in Ada. When I first saw Python, way back in version 1.5, I was happy to see exceptions.
But is Dart better than Typescript? I prefer Typescript for multiple reasons but one of them is that you don't have to use classes to use the advanced typing system. Without a typing system I like Ruby the most, but sometimes we just need a typing system.
Dart is better in some ways and worse in others.
1. It has an actually sound type system.
2. The language and standard library are waaaaaaaay ahead of Javascript.
3. The tooling is top notch. Better than JS/TS.
But on the other hand:
4. Way smaller ecosystem.
5. Debugging is worse if you're compiling to JS. The fact that the code you run is basically identical to the code you write in TS can be a big advantage. Only really applies for web pages though.
6. Type unions are way nicer in TS.
7. Non-nullable types interact badly with classes. It can make writing methods correctly really awkward - you have to explicitly copy member variables to locals, modify them and then write them back.
8. Way smaller community.
As someone curious about learning more about type systems, would you mind elaborating on 1.? I'm assuming you mean the formal definition of "sound", not just as a synonym for "sensible". Sound typing is often something handwaved away as not being particulary consequential in practice; what benefits have you seen there?
2 replies →
> I wish Flutter was written in Ada but atleast Dart is better than JavaScript atleast for procedural code without it's oop boiler plate. You don't actually need OOP for widgets.
You can use other libraries for this like Riverpod with flutter_hooks and functional_widget which essentially removes the OOP structure of widgets and turns them more into functions, in a way.
I second that. From 8 to 64 bits systems, embedded or system programming, Ada is the best choice. I've saved tons of missing hours, headhaches, etc. with this gem. Search Github Sowebio Adel for a good setup manual and, in the same repo, v22 for a good gp kiss framework...
What are you using Ada for?
Embedded 8 and 32 bits microcontrollers to web linux based erp/crm softwares. Ada can be used for anything, with the speed of C/C++ but in a far more readable and safer way... Ada is a secret weapon. Don't spread theses infos ;)