Re: Help with book, "Ada for Pyjama Coders"

["Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>]

On 8/9/2012 3:50 PM, Patrick wrote:
> Hi Everyone
>
> If Google just picked an Ada subset and supported that, Ada would be the new and coolest thing.


Yes ofcourse.

I think it is very hard for a language to become popular without
a large company/organization supporting it. At least initially
if not all the time. Look at the history of programming  languages
and you will notice this. Examples are plenty. (COBOL, PLI, JCL,
FORTRAN, C/C++, C#, Java, BASIC, etc...) all had large company that
started it and made them popular initially and some to this day
are behind them and supporting them.

Ada got popular when the DOD was behind it. After the DOD let go and
there is was no large entity supporting Ada any more, it became much less
popular, at least nothing like it was in the 80's. in middle 80's, everyone
was talking about nothing but Ada. Ada was the second most popular
language in 1987 !

see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

There are very few languages that can get popular without large entity
supporting them. This happens only when the language happens to provide
something unique that is new and not available with other current
languages.

So, if and when we see an announcement of visual Ada by Microsoft, is
the day Ada will suddenly become popular and cool :)

--Nasser