Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Ali Bendriss wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 January 2007 06:37, adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:
>> <artifact.one@googlemail.com> wrote in message
>> news:1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>>
>>> My question is: how come Ada isn't more popular?
>> Ada suffered, in its early days, from a convergence of several
>> things.  One is that the designers of the language did not anticipate
>> the impact of the personal computer and the democratization of
>> computing.   There were other factors, as well.
>> [...]
> 
> Does the fact that there is no "public" operating system written in Ada is one 
> of this factor ? 
> I think about the closest link between the C language and the *nix systems.
> 
> 
That's a factor, but only a small one, and getting smaller as 
time goes on.  I, personally, think that one factor IS the 
lack of a standard garbage collector.  Related to this is the 
awkwardness of dealing with strings of varying lengths.

There are many features which aren't significant after you've 
learned how to work your way around them that can be sizeable 
blockages at the start.

Remember that at the start, Ada was competing solely against 
C.  C++ barely existed, and what did exist didn't bear that 
much resemblance to what we now call C++.  (I used to use C++ 
rather than C solely because of the typed constants.)  At that 
point C had to be cut down to compile on a micro-computer. 
Look up BSD C or Lifeboat C.  These were SUBSETS of C, but 
they could be used, and they could call themselves C.  (Once 
you started using them, you became well aware that they were 
subsets...works in progress as it were.)  Ada subsets couldn't 
use the name Ada.  Janus Ada couldn't call itself Ada for 
quite awhile.  And even Janus Ada couldn't run on most CP/M 
machines.  Too resource intensive.  I bought an Apple ][ to 
run UCSD Pascal, and was so disappointed that I saved up and 
installed a CP/M card so that I could run C.  Ada wasn't a 
possibility.  (I never seriously considered Basic.  It was too 
non-portable.  If I wanted non-portable, I'd go for assembler.)

Ada was HUGE and C++ was only a slight bit larger than C. 
(The times they DO change!)  At that time I was a PL/I 
programmer on a mainframe, and Ada had a reputation that 
caused me to both lust after it, and to fear it's 
complexities.  Actually, however, it was never a realistic 
possibility.  I couldn't run it on my home machine, and work 
sure wasn't going to pay the have the service bureau install 
it.  So I dreamed about it...and Algol68, and Snobol, and IPL, 
and APL, and LISP...and didn't take any of those dreams 
seriously.  But of those only Ada and Algol were frightening 
as well as lust provoking.