Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

duggar@mit.edu (Keith H Duggar) wrote in message news:<b47de02.0408161309.151f6a53@posting.google.com>...
> 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?

I don't your guru got it quite right.  Ada failed because most
programmers who tried it found Ada programming to be relative less
productive than programming in other available languages.  Ada never
attracted a large enough base of motivated users to develop the
libraries and IDEs that would make it easy to use.  Even with
available public domain compilers, almost no one is choosing to
program in Ada.

Since Ada was introduced, other new languages like C++ and Perl and
Java and C# and Python and Ruby have been relatively successful. 
While those languages are far from perfect, programmers have learned
to work with or around those imperfections, and have found enough
other benefits to learn them and use them.

In a nutshell, Ada is not popular because most people who have tried
it didn't like it.