Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?

[john@peppermind.com]

Some reasons (subjective list):

1. People like to hack and only (too) late started worrying about safety and security in general computing.

2. Lack of education about programming language design (during the 70s-90s)

3. The success of Unix written in C, the fact that Apple abandoned Pascal.

4. Bad language "politics" & marketing: the community split up too early because Wirth started to change to Modula, then Modula 2, then Oberon, etc.

... and regarding Ada specifically:

5. Availability of completely free and unrestricted compilers and tool chains for C and C++ as opposed to Ada

6. Variety of available C and C++ compilers as opposed to Ada compilers

7. Slightly unintuitive and overloaded core syntax of Ada (e.g. "with" and "when", pragma, alignment clauses)

8. A too modern and too rich core feature set in the early days (in combination with 2, creating confusion and wrong rumours about "design by committee")

9. At least in the past, many people tended to prefer code brevity over code readability (this trend has changed a bit, due to scripting language and the increased complexity of the programs and their OS environments)

10. Jean David Ichbiah apparently did not have a long beard - it has been observed that only programming languages whose inventor has a long beard become truly popular, although nobody knows why.