ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[chris@unixfu.net (Chris Humphries)]

Hello,

   Would like to open up the newsgroup for discussion of why
 ADA is not as popular as (of now me learning it) to it is 
 not as popular as other languages (Perl, Java, C++, C#, C).

   I can understand why C is popular, UNIX and all the tools
 for it and most of everything that runs the internet services
 (smtp, http [apache mostly according to netcraft.com], bind).
 Perl (well I use it at work, for legacy reasons of taking over
 code) I can understand due to it just being so easy to get
 something done fast in (and I must say that the regex abilities
 are definitely something that you can get used to quickly, heh.
 CPAN is also a nice feature, tons of modules/libraries to use
 for most everything one command line away.

   Java and C++ got huge during the OOP boom of the 90's, and now
 almost every Computer Science student in college has taken at
 least one of those languages.

   Java does have some nice OO abilities and there are a ton of
 libraries for it. C++ has some OO-ish abilities, yet can be 
 compiled and also has a ton of libraries.

   Yet as I grew in my programming experience and abilities, I
 learned that most of my time was spent updating and fixing code.

   C/C++ took a lot of time to develop in, and I didn't like 
 having to worry about memory management and use my gdb-fu to
 figure out why something did not work.

   Perl is somewhat better, though it is mostly just if syntax
 doesn't match up right. If it is quick and dirty, Perl excels.
 Granted, I do have a written from bottom up programs we now use
 in the company here as a core part of daily life and it is in
 nothing by Perl.
   
   Java is kinda nice, but honestly the dependency of the VM is
 nice in concept, but a pain in real life. You need to make sure
 that your program either is portable to several versions of
 virtual machines or you have to bundle your own (for client apps).
 Java is just too slow (I can not afford the hardware or even justify
 it's use of hardware money to make it's speed comparable with other
 "free" alternatives) for cgi based applications, though the whole
 application server thing with db connection pooling is cool.

   Python is nice too, and I suppose no real reason to not use it.
 I have coded python since 1.5 and early Zope releases. I just would
 like to not code in it anymore, though reason are because I am 
 sick of it.

   So, why is ADA not as popular as the above languages to the
 world (well especially opensource developers) outside of dod and
 defense contractors and banks? It seems like an extremely powerful
 and awesome language, and it is just so easy to look at the code
 and tell what is going on and what is what. It can be OO and can
 run tasks concurrently. It's runtime and compile checking is awesome.
 GNAT is free and available to all to use.

  So what is stopping ADA from being a language everyone knows? Is
 it just viewed as old and arcane like COBOL and Fortran (no offense
 to those that know these languages better than me)? Is it just lacking
 some killer apps? Is it because most ADA is closed source, so there
 are just not libraries out there (like a SSH library)?

Thanks,
Chris