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> The Ada philosophy has it right: readability and correctness far outweigh writeability.

Given the popular success of Ada I'm not sure I would call that "having it right" except in very specific circumstances




There are various reasons Ada didn't take over the world, I'm not convinced that its emphasis on readability over writeability is one of them. Far more time is spent on maintaining code than on initial development, and anyway, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for writing new code.

Code review? You're in the business of reading code. Fixing bugs? You're in the business of reading code. Modifying/extending/porting an existing codebase? You're in the business of reading code.

If you're writing trivial single-use 'throwaway' code that needs no review, then readability doesn't much matter, but it's an important factor for just about all serious codebases.

Of course, there's also the question of whether Ada's specific syntax really succeeds in being more readable. It makes extensive use of English words in ways that are sometimes awkward and unnatural. I'm not a fan of its and then / or else short-circuit operators, for instance, and think they should just have gone with something like C's && / || operators. Neither syntax is self-explanatory to someone who doesn't know the language, but at least C's syntax doesn't counterintuitively collide with English.




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