Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[duggar@mit.edu (Keith H Duggar)]

Greetings all. Thank you for opening this thread I'm very
eager to learn more about Ada.

If I may explain. I'm a proficient C++ coder and have been
using it for scientific research coding for eight years. And
I have experience with various other languages including C
and Fortran.

Recently, quite by accident, I ran into the Ada language
having (unfortunately) barely heard of it and having never
seen or been taught anything about it.

When I first saw Ada I thought wow this looks like an 
excellent language. In the very least it is a language that
I wish I had known about much earlier. For example, I wish
Georgia Tech had included Ada in a course of two as they had
included Fortran and C.

So, after researching a bit on the web I still couldn't find
and explanations for why Ada isn't that popular. I decided
to email a well known programming and compiler guru who had
once commented positively on Ada. I asked why Ada wasn't as
popular as C++ (a language which he is also a guru of). Here
was his reply:

"Ada was an experiment that failed. It was specified in such a way
that it's hard to get adequate performance. So a critical mass of
users and vendors never materialized. Now we see people devoting more
energy to making C/C++ safer for programming large systems."

Can any of you help me understand the details behind what he
stated? Was it difficult to write compilers that gave good
performance? Was the language specification too complex or
difficult to implement?

Or are there simply missing features that preclude some
efficient coding idioms (does Ada have pointers?). I'm
very ignorant when it comes to Ada so please forgive these
newbie questions.

Keith