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	ada
	March 02nd, 2019
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	I must be 30% magpie or something because I can't steer clear of
	shiny new things no matter how hard I try. In this case, the shiny
	"new" thing isn't so new at all, but is a programming language
	from 1980 (when I was born). Ada [0] is a brilliant language. It's
	incredibly simple, syntactically, but also extremely powerful. It
	makes conscious decisions to forgo speed and brevity in exchange
	for safety and clarity. It is cautious where other languages are
	bold.

	Here's a "hello, world" example:

	with Ada.Text_IO;
	procedure Hello is
	use Ada.Text_IO;
	begin
	Put_Line("Hello, World!");
	end Hello;

	Everything is spelled out. Every instruction ends with
	a semicolon, everything is case insensitive, variables must be
	declared between the "is" and "begin" of a procedure. Every
	beginning has an explicit end, which is labeled. It's so
	ridiculously cautious!

	I told ~ben the other day that it's the Tigran Petrosian [1] of
	programming languages. The whole mentality is so neat to me.

	There's a lot of languages out there and I don't need to learn
	this one. While it's true that I haven't kept up with any
	systems-programming languages it's not really a gap in my
	knowledge. It's just that I have no need of them since I don't do
	that type of work. So why learn something that's best suited to
	massive government builds? Cause FUCK YOU, I wanna!

	Look forward to seeing a bunch of shell work done in Ada in the
	near future. I was going to make Cosmic Voyage's web generation
	script in python instead of continuing to grow the massive /bin/sh
	script, but maybe I'll tackle it in Ada instead.

	Has anyone out there ever used it for web programming before? That
	tickles me pink!

	Anywho, any of you know and use Ada? I learned the basics in
	college but have never done anything worth a damn in it. I found
	a bunch of resources online including a standards site with the
	most Orwellian name ever: Ada Conformity Assessment Authority [2].
	Hah! So badass. They're serious about following conventions with
	it, which really makes sense for the applications it serves. PEP8
	is similar for python. If you feel like diving in with me, here's
	a link to a crash-course in the form of a ~40pg PDF [3]. I'm going
	to store my practice programs and notes in a git repo [4].

	Now, lets see if I can do this without cutting into my Icelandic
	practice, or my writing on this phlog, or on Cosmic Voyage, or my
	preparations for the upcoming move, or planning my wife's 50th
	birthday party (SEEEECRET) or any of the other things that are
	actually important which I should be focusing on instead.

	- xoxo, magpie

	[0] Ada (programming language)
	[1] Tigran Petrosian
	[2] Ada 2012 Language Reference Manual
	[3] Ada Crash Course
	[4] tomasino's ada practice repo