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Date: 2018-04-15T22:35:58-07:00
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"Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net> writes:
> How will Ada use one base of programmers/software-engineers as a basis
> to move onto convincing another group of programmers/software-
> engineers of Ada's advantages?  Or is the purpose of Ada to preach to
> its current choir without trying to fill the pews with new
> parishioners?

I'd like to know why Rust was invented: there was obviously a need for a
safer alternative to C++, but was Ada the answer that everyone simply
overlooked?

I think answering your question would require an informed and critical
comparison between Rust and Ada.  Something with real depth rather than
"verbose vs curly braces".  I do know Rust has formal-methods work going
on.

I've read about Rust a little but haven't yet tried to use it.  I've
played with Ada a little but not done anything serious.  In practice I
use C++ when I want to write low level compiled code these days, but of
course its shortcomings are well known.

I'm not convinced that a need for a non-garbage-collected big-systems
language even exists any more.  Obviously low-level, high reliability
realtime programming is important, but they tend to run on small
systems, or else they can be in fairly small subsystems of a bigger
system.  Tim Sweeney's well-known talk "The Next Mainstream Programming
Language" conveys a similar idea:

https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf