Products · Product
Ada
Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 20 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Free toolchain is hard to get working properlyUnreviewed
20092026- Ada tooling and docs lack good user experience for non-specialists, deterring adoption2025-02-10
- Getting a web stack in place in Ada requires a lot of manual work2022-02-10
- Free Ada toolchain is hard to get working properly and unintuitive2019-02-25
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 24 complaints
- File-handling is the crustiest part; posix flags need the Form parameter2026-04-18
- Syntax was hard to learn and working with the language felt slow2026-04-17
- Ada tooling and docs lack good user experience for non-specialists, deterring adoption2025-02-10
- Attribute usage is inconsistent, making it hard to know what things are2025-02-09
- Documentation is a pile of facts with little guidance toward the right function or type2024-12-01
- Couldn't find the page explaining the object.field syntax in the manual, failed exam2024-02-14
- Parentheses for both calls and subscripts make function calls, variables and arrays hard to tell apart2022-11-07
- Package manager exists but has few packages, so it is hard to use in practice2022-02-10
- Getting a web stack in place in Ada requires a lot of manual work2022-02-10
- Compiles took hours and printing a value needed verbose generic instantiation2021-12-29
- Can't tell variables, arrays and function calls apart without looking up definitions2021-09-10
- Reference is hard to search and formatted in an unusable way2020-02-14
- Free Ada toolchain is hard to get working properly and unintuitive2019-02-25
- Could not find how to convert a one-character string to a char type2017-05-02
- Verbose syntax forces retyping type names everywhere, hurting readability and writing2016-11-02
- OO syntax is hard to remember, so the author keeps getting it wrong2016-10-01
- Bit manipulation requires awkward hoops, making embedded low-level work cumbersome2016-03-02
- Hard to tell what the 'class suffix does; dispatching behaviour is confusing and unclear2016-03-02
- Methods are defined by invisible syntax and can't be interleaved with other statements2015-10-22
- Hidden requirement that class methods must sit adjacent to the class declaration, else compiler gets confused2015-05-20
- Having to fix indentation issues by hand in a terminal editor was annoying2014-05-31
- Same keywords mean different things in different contexts, like delay2014-05-31
- Strict typing forces so many explicit type conversions that coding takes much more effort2009-04-30
- Compiler error messages are cryptic and the strict compiler makes getting syntax right consume time2009-02-09