Ada seems large and complex, why is it this way?
(Robert Dewar, lead designer of the GNU Ada compiler, responds): During the Ada 9X development process we have often had fierce arguments over the need to simplify proposals, and I pointed out some time ago that the idea of simplicity is heavily overloaded: * simple to implement * simple to describe informally * simple to describe formally * results in simple programs * simple to understand and/or remember * short to describe None of these goals are quite the same, and often they severely conflict. If you listen to programming language design types, especially from universities, they often have very little experience in programming, and especially little experience in writing large delivered, maintained software. That doesn’t mean they know nothing about programming languages, but it does tend to mean that their view of complexity is skewed, and in particularly concentrates on the simplicity of the language itself, rather than on the simplicity of resulting programs. A lot of the creat
