Ada and the Language Renaissance

By Shannon Cochran

September 19, 2005

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The growth of the Internet has sparked a renaissance in computer language design. No longer confined to trading ideas at conferences or in academic journals, programming language aficionados can easily find each other in web forums and mailing lists. In this way "little" languages like Ruby and Lisp have accumulated large, active communities of developers that continue to discover new uses for these technologies.

Another language that has benefitted from grassroots-level development is Ada. Back in 1995, the Department of Defense spent "probably tens of thousands of dollars" to sponsor the development of Ada 95, estimates Robert Dewar of AdaCore. Now Ada 2005 is coming out—and this time, the work was largely completed by volunteers, with some backing from vendors.

You probably haven't thought about Ada for a while, unless you write software for airplanes. But the language is alive and well. Designed in the 1970s to meet Department of Defense requirements for software reliability, Ada is still flourishing in industries that require large scale mission critical programs. And Dewar, of course, thinks that category could be expanded.

"There are lot of systems that—somebody may not drop dead if there's a bug, but the consequences could still be enormous," he points out. eBay, he thinks, is a perfect example. As a 25 million dollar company that's absolutely dependent on a single program, "a company like eBay could perfectly well spend the resources to regard that as a critical program that MUST work," he says. "If we put our mind to it and use the right techniques and are willing to spend the resources, this general wisdom that all programs have bugs in them is not acceptable."

Ada is considered a more reliable language than Java or C because it features safe, high level memory management as well as a number of compile-time and run-time checks to help avoid bugs like buffer overflows or access to unallocated memory. The Ada 95 revision added object oriented features including dynamic dispatch to the language.

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