Re: Learning Ada

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 16/09/2020 12:55, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 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.

I mostly agree with your analysis, except the last part. The problem is 
that the culture of programming and overall education became so low that 
it is no more a race against C++. C++ itself is in defense and losing 
against languages and practices so overwhelmingly bad that even C looks 
as a shining beacon. Winter is coming.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de