Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com]

Jeffrey R. Carter:

> >      Turbo Pascal and other alternatives were already in place and
> >      much cheaper than Ada.   A few brave souls tried to compete
> >      with products such as RR Software's Janus Ada and Meridian's
> >      AdaVantage, but the full environment (e.g., integrated editors,
> >      debuggers, etc.) were not in place they were for Turbo Pascal.
> There's always the question of why, given TP's widespread popularity, C
> became more popular.

It has to do with the deep unportability of Pascal and (consequence)
the fragmentation of Pascal into incompatible dialects. At the time you
had Amiga's, Atari's, Mac's; you had MS Windows coming to replace DOS,
so a DOS-oriented, Pascal dialect had little chance against C, except
for a short time.
TP was an extremely fast compiler producing unoptimized code (except
some trivial XOR AX,AX's), but with the CPU's frequencies quickly up
around 1990, the interest was more targeted to profit from this speed
in the compiled code and less to have a couple millions more of LoC
compiled per second.
...
> Windows 95 was the 1st widely used OS with support for tasking. Ada (95)
> was the only widely available language with support for tasking at the
> time. We probably lost a good opportunity to gain more acceptance of Ada
> by not including a standard windowing library and promoting Ada as the
> best language for taking advantage of Win95's features.

Mmmh I think  it was a good idea *not* to include a standard windowing
library: then now Ada would be stuck with an outdated standard
windowing library. There was also another problem then: the lack of a
good but cheap or free compiler.
Don't be so pessimistic, Ada's quality only appear with time - and of
course with the effort of brave souls.
If you say "I'm a smart software engineer, Ada is for me and not for
you", you won't help Ada.
If you make good, visible, useful open-source software with Ada, you
will help.
______________________________________________________________
Gautier         -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/index.htm
Ada programming -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!