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Comment by lamarpye | Hacker News Reader

I've spent a large percentage of my life in bookstores and I have never seen an Ada book. I've never met an Ada programmer or met someone who knew an Ada programmer. Is there any proof that the language actually existed? Maybe it was a CIA plot to trick the commies into wasting their time.

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I have bought a couple of them during the mid-90's in Lisbon technical bookstores for university students.

Our university library also had a couple.

Indeed our university library was a treasure well for anyone doing the compiler design and systems lectures.

As a student in Lisbon, may I ask which university?

FCT/UNL, back in the mid 90's.

Smalltalk, Concurrent Pascal, Oberon, Concurrent C, ML, Eiffel, *Lisp, Algol, Ada, and many more on the library section available to Master/Phd students.

Very interesting. I'm very disappointed at the state of my faculty's library (FCUL). Even landmark works by the most influential of computer scientists are missing, being in their place endless copies of mindless "for dummies" garbage from the 90s and 00s.

Surely your comment was written in jest, but one example of companies that uses (or used) Ada is SAAB: https://www.adacore.com/press/saab-signs-corporate-wide-soft...

There is the theory it was a Cold War weapon of economic warfare. But the US government employs a lot of Ada programmers so it seems to have backfired.

I might still have an Ada book around the house, and I may have met somebody who used Ada outside of school. As for the CIA, have a look at http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-0... .

That's because Ada's entire usage is corporate environments. If textbooks do exist, then they would be marketed to companies not consumers, as that's who would be paying.

Why not learn it now? : ) https://learn.adacore.com/

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