From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c406e0c4a6eb74ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request Date: 17 Aug 2004 16:54:18 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.23.26.253 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1092786895 15313 127.0.0.1 (17 Aug 2004 23:54:55 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:54:55 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2792 Date: 2004-08-17T16:54:18-07:00 List-Id: duggar@mit.edu (Keith H Duggar) wrote in message news:... > 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.