not be many or even any new projects being created using some of these
languages, but if you are attentive, you are likely to find each of them in use
somewhere. A 2013 quote from The Register by Richard Chirgwin illustrates
this beautifully: “The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day,
powering GE nuclear power-plant robots—and will do so for another 37
years. That’s right: PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear
industry is planning on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050—
long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go”
(from
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/
The PDP-11 came out in 1970 and has not been produced since the early
1990s. Programming languages, like programs, always seem to outlast their
expected or intended life span. Who knows? Learning that old language that
everyone laughs about may benefit you with a well-paying, unique job as well
as help you to think about human–computer communication in a different
way.
Ada
Ada is based on Pascal. It is named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who
wrote the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine—specifically
the mechanical computing device created by Charles Babbage.
The language is most known for its use in embedded systems, especially in
the aeronautics and avionics realm. Ada is well known as a reliable and
efficient real-time language. It is most commonly encountered in aircraft
systems, air traffic control and railroad systems, and medical devices. It is
also often used as a teaching language for computer science courses.
Language highlights include static typing, concurrency, synchronous message
passing, protected objects, modularization, and exception handling. Ada is
object oriented, has standard libraries for things like I/O and containers, has
good interfaces to other languages like C, and works well with distributed
systems and numerical processing.
To use Ada on Ubuntu, you write programs in your favorite text editor. To
compile, you need the package gnat, which is the GNU Ada Compiler. You
may want to consider gnat-gps, which installs the Gnat Programming
System, an integrated development environment (IDE) specifically for Ada
and C programming.