Software Engineering with Ada

I have long been perplexed by the knowledge accumulation problem in self-teaching. How does one know that one is actually learning something that is True, the the heavy-handed philosophical sense, and possibly useful in the future? Programming languages are an odd thing, few are ISO standards. The few that are I would assume would have the longest-lasting value in learning. However, many globs of proprietary or underdocumented or constantly shifting languages are in use. Recently PHP finally developed The PHP Foundation (please consider donating) after realizing they only had two important developers, and one of them was resigning from the project to work on LLVM. Computer science has few big equations that it an look back at for decades. Only some algorithms, which do not lend themselves well to notation that is  readable in half a century. Python and Java are also not international standards and are widely used. 2022 Marks 50 years of C and I will probably be writing more about it soon. The interpreted languages it could be argued feed off of standard C, and are naturally just an extension of a user's C knowledge. I am inclined to think that way as well even thought JS and Ruby are standardized. I look forward to the future standardization of Go and Rust. What lasts? The Ada programming language has been there silently for decades doing serious work in the aviation sector. It is standardized, the last time being 2012, so a very conservative technology. I recently quired a book that is about 25 years old. That is something I will be writing more about. Books at least 25 years old that still hold value and Truth in this discipline. Where are they? What are they like? The Ada book (authors Grady Booch and Doug Bryan) is an interesting specimen, as is the language to which it pertains. It describes constructs such as packages, procedures, and different from procedures, functions. I have yet to test the source code contained in the book, most of it is not meant to be used but instead to demonstrate the principles discussed. The book contains a convenient appendix including a full syntax chart and the standard libraries, called here the predefined language environment.