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Dijkstra on Ada

Dijkstra was one of the reviewers of the fours language proposals which eventually lead to the language Ada: red, green, blue, and yellow (the winning proposal was green). Here are some quotes from…

Dijkstra was one of the reviewers of the fours language proposals which eventually lead to the language Ada: red, green, blue, and yellow (the winning proposal was green). “technical incompetence, probably enhanced by dishonesty” “I tried to reconstruct from the documentation a coherent design philosophy, an effort in which I failed: the mixture between sense and nonsense remained baffling” In a conversation with Andrei P. Ershov (Soviet computer scientist), when asked about his view on Ada, Dijkstra commented that “ Ada was such a mess that I shuddered at the thought that Western security would depend on it and that I would feel much safer if the Red Army were to adopt it as well.

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