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by Rochus·7mo ago·view on hn ↗
Ada follows another philosophy than C and many developers. The 1979 Ada Rationale explicitly states "Readability is more important than writability". Jean Ichbiah, the creator of Ada, explained in an interview that "even if it takes a little longer to write it, it is far more important that a program be readable than writable. For 20 years after the program is written, programmers will have to read it to maintain it." This contrasts with the "fire and forget" attitude of many developers, which often manifests as a "write-once" culture, where the primary goal is to get the logic into the machine as quickly as possible, with little regard for the human who must read it later.
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The irony is that symbol-based concise code is much easier to read and comprehend compared to blobs of text. Even replacing Do/Begin/End-s with curly braces would help a lot.
This is a common belief among experienced programmers, but it is largely contradicted by empirical science, especially when discussing novices or general maintainability. First, it is not only about syntax, but also about the possibility to explicate the actual intent of the code. Ada offers special syntax for almost every conceivable use case, allowing developers to clearly express their intentions in the code so that others can understand them. And there are also scientific studies which clearly show that explicit words significantly outperform symbol-heavy languages (e.g. https://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/An_Empirical_Investigation..., https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1668029/FULLTEXT..., https://www.ime.usp.br/~gerosa/papers/ICPC2018-Legibility.pd...).