Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

JPWoodruff wrote:

> classes of smart young
>teenagers have had easy access to computers and amateur tools, and
>have honed their skills at what most of them called "hacking".  They
>learned to reason in low levels of abstraction.  They spent a lot of
>time in thread-of-execution debugging.

Well, thread-of-execution is an extremely powerful abstraction, which appears
both as high-level and as low-level one. And thread-of-execution debugging
richly furnishes this abstraction with emotionally colored and socially 
sharable practical cases. No wonder that it attracts some fraction of smart
young teenagers.

> One way is to want to write interesting essays in the form of executable
>programs.  Ada is one of the finest tools for this task - at least as
>far as our kind of program is concerned.

The problem with this way is that it is hard to find a publishable subject,
which has sufficient potential of interest for "smart young teenagers" and
at the same time clearly demonstrates the strengths of Ada language.

It is because Ada language isn't adapted well for vague outlining of
possibilities and opportunities. Its main strengths are in expression of
very real and actual things, which, if are interesting, unfortunately almost
always are parts (or contain elements of or somehow connected with)
military/commercial/trade secrets.