ADA was designed around a competition between four companies, to make it unbiased the proposals got named by colour.
Honeywell was Green, Intermetrics was Red, SofTech was Blue, and SRI was Yellow. There where no other colors.
As a aside : let's thank the FSM that Dijkstra never had access to social media - I suspect he had the kind of "abrasive" personality that would have made him probe to wasting his time and intellect arguing with all the randos of the world.
I think it was blowback to the hype. Rust, sadly, seem to be bound to end likewise as the rustaceans enthusiastically endorse AI-driven rewriting of legacy DoD C code into Rust. What can go wrong there?
ggm•6h ago
My back reasoning to it's truth is threefold:
1) He did a residency at York university relating to pascal and modula in teaching CS. That's why my first uni language was pascal. (He'd just left)
2) York used pascal and modula heavily across the Ada specification window
3) York got an SERC or other funding contract to implement a multi pass Ada compiler on BSD Unix.
Which would mean (if true) Dijkstra's comments basically slated all of the candidate languages, and by implication Wirths language views, given he'd worked on the IFIP programming language specification process and was so strongly associated with pascal variants of imperative programming languages.