Re: Learning Ada

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Jack Davy <algojack@tutanota.com> writes:
> The more I look at this language the more I wonder why it isn't more
> popular. Maybe people just don't like the pascalish syntax, but that
> never put me off because I learned Turbo Pascal at Uni (25 years ago)
> and more recently Free Pascal/Lazarus. Never was much of a fan of the
> curly bracket languages.

I wasn't there when it happened but I read that early Ada 83 compilers
were buggy, slow and outrageously expensive because marketed only at one
captive customer, the US DoD.  (In their defence, Ada is a prticularly
difficult language to implement well, orders of magnitude more so than
Pascal or C).  The vendors never really tried to sell Ada development
tools outside the military, despite hype that Ada was the language of
the future.  At around the same time, C++ used the opposite strategy of
selling cheap compilers, with the additional advantage of backward
compatibility with C, so they won market share.  Turbo Pascal was a
contender back then but only on DOS and Windows, so it ultimately lost
to C++, possibly in no small part because of Borland's refusal to abide
by any portable standard.  And then Sun marketed Java aggressively with
a zero-cost compiler and promises of ultimate portability, and stole the
show.

The Ada landcsape changed dramatically when the first Free Sofwtare Ada
95 compiler, gnat, arrived, but the damage to the reputation of Ada was
very hard to overcome.  An entire generation of military and corporate
programmers, frustrated by the early compilers, became managers and
dismissed Ada out of hand for decades.  They and their prejudices have
started to retire in the past few years and I think this is one factor
in the current renaissance of Ada.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.
The market thinker synergizes the cross-enterprise trends.