Re: Fun with History: “Why wasn't Ada83 object oriented?”

[Marco <prenom_nomus@yahoo.com>]

4. Early compilers were way, way too expensive, and compilers were (and
   still are today) very difficult to implement...

   The obvious repercussion of this is that there weren't any cheap
   compilers (say, in the US$50 - US$100 range) that you could run on
   your PC at home, so no one could experiment with the language.  Ada
   essentially missed the boat in the PC revolution, and so was never
   able to develop the grass-roots support that Pascal and C had
   (because those languages were relatively easy to implement, and were
   therefore much more readily available).

I lived and worked through this time period and I believe this is by FAR the main reason Ada was not as popular. Primarily because the DoD did not allow or define a nice subset (excluding tasking for example) that would have allowed a DOS Turbo-Ada to be created for a reasonable price. We used Ada as a design language and then implemented it in C (this was not very efficient but some of us were quite interested in the new language). 

Of course OO is longer considered the silver bullet today. I am learning Haskell.