Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <jrcarter@acm.org>]

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:
>>
> 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.

An excellent reply. Ada was also ahead of its time. Computers in 1983 
really weren't up to the demands of Ada.

>      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.

> 6) Really good compilers began to appear around 1989.   By then Ada's reputation
>     for being slow, cumbersome, and hard to use had already been firmly set.

Actually, the DEC Ada compiler of 1984 was pretty good.

> 8) Grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory.   In the mid-90's, when Ada became
>     a powerful alternative to other languages, when tools were in place, the 
> language
>     modernized, and the availability of low-cost (or free) compilers could have 
> made
>     it attractive, the DoD lost its nerve and gave the impression that Ada was 
> no longer
>     part of the DoD language requirement.  A lot of people misinterpreted this 
> and thought
>     the DoD had decided to abandon Ada entirely.

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.