From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_20 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Learning Ada Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 12:55:58 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: <87tuvyourl.fsf@samuel> References: <1dab8412-0ff6-4081-b973-783167a37e6cn@googlegroups.com> <620a8fb2-758c-4bca-b4d3-f2e49fce3703n@googlegroups.com> <871rj2cy61.fsf@nightsong.com> <211a3c48-447a-4d23-840d-d868da44f740n@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="10aa6a96f9a26a9a168fdea45450db79"; logging-data="20450"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/X4V4B2tP9EXWQCvrPukuf" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:PC3u6+1+jg/14e/47cyTHKjLzv0= sha1:8lXSggGqI2vMDQdfUJH5+fB7HFU= Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:60160 List-Id: Jack Davy 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.