Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

Ali Bendriss wrote:
On Tuesday 23 January 2007 06:37, adaworks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
<artifact.one@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1169531612.200010.153120@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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.


.

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