
The big break in computer languages - axk
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724
======
gnarly
Are we all just pretending that Ada doesn't exist now? It's type safe, thread
safe, memory safe, overrun safe, a whole bunch of other sorts of safe. It was
designed to accommodate huge projects. It has been used in major projects. It
has an open source toolchain, and the unusual feature of a freely available
ISO standard. And it has been around as long as C++. Yet not a word about it
anywhere in the article.

~~~
budman1
Ada is proof that language selection is political or social, not based on
technical merit. My opinion is Ada is a viable candidate language for use
today, if you care about what it costs to develop or how long it takes. For
over 20 years, the ada compiler and run time have been minimizing defects to a
greater degree than any other language / run time. (Note: In my world, C++ has
banished ada to the trash heap of 'legacy code', along with ton's of fortran.
The C++ replacements are rarely equal; in perfection or in supportability)

------
digitalzombie
I was wondering why OP group Go and Rust together...

After the long post the conclusion from what I take away was OP is sick of
managing memory and rather have a garbage collector to do it. API not
stablized for Rust is a valid concern but overall all I can hear was wanted GC
and barrow checker was too hard.

~~~
nickm12
Eric Raymond is not a fan of Rust. See "Rust severely disappoints
me"([http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7294](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7294)). On one
level, he's clearly right. Go was designed to be an simple language that is
easy to pick up. Rust had a very different design space. On the other hand,
when picking a language for your long-term project, I think there are other
factors beyond how proficient you can be in your first few days that should
come into play.

Personally, I'm not very bullish on Golang moving into the lowest levels of
the stack (the space currently dominated by C and C++). It just doesn't seem
like an area where the language designers of Golang are interesting in
competing. Swift, on the other hand, definitely has aspirations in this area
and it is actively being developed by a company that writes a lot of low-level
system software.

I think Go, Swift, and Rust each are interesting in their own way and see them
jostling to become the next generation of industry standard languages in the
next 10 years.

