Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

In fairness, the DoD actually *did* throw a lot of money at Ada. IMHO, 
it just didn't get spent effectively. Not much was done to "Market" the 
language or "Prime The Pump" by getting good, inexpensive compilers out 
into the hands of lots of programmers. Gnat was a good example of how 
that can help, but it came along rather late in the day and by then, 
opinions had been formed and other things had come along that had 
captured the market better, so it wasn't as effective as it might have been.

(Imagine what the world would have been like if back in 1983, the DoD 
had funded a free compiler of descent quality that would run on a PC or 
some of the other popular hardware of the day. There wasn't anything 
quite like that back then and maybe people would have used it just 
because it was the only free compiler you could get.)

Ada still has a pretty good following, but it does need to expand on 
that base. Things like Gnat and GtkAda help provide some of the 
necessary infrastructure. An "Out Of The Box" database and a library of 
utilities that goes along with it would be good additions that would 
help provide a more complete programming kit. That, and a little 
"Newness" that could be hyped as providing something you can't get 
elsewhere and Ada might see some new growth in new arenas.

MDC


Nick Roberts wrote:
> 
> I'm pretty sure the main reasons are: that there has never been a
> (really) big corporation backing Ada, in the same way that many of the
> languages you mention have had; that Ada is not a language suited for
> or much liked by many non-professional programmers.

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