Did Ada - or rather its proponents - make any effort to get people to learn it? If I google for "Ada programming language" I do not even find what could be an official site? I thought it could be adacore.com, but that's a commercial offering. Wiki tells me it could also be adaic.org, which errors out with "SSL_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION" in current Firefox. Even if I could access the site: Would I find tutorials? Other supporting material? Explanations why I should use Ada?

If you want people to use your language you have a to put in work. Even more for a language with the reputation of Ada (the sibling comment by pjmlp gives a good overview).

There's a lot of love for Ada. Unlike Rust, Ada is already an approved language and toolchain for safety-critical software development. That Sealed Rust is trying to do what it takes to get Rust into the approved language & toolchain category along side Ada is entirely the point, and what makes it interesting.

I guess, due to a couple of things.

1 - There is a younger generation that thinks C and C++ are the only game in town, and never learn about myriad of systems programming languages going back to 1961.

2 - This same generation is very averse paying for tooling and among the six surviving Ada compiler vendors, GNAT is the only free one, and even then discussions about its licensing pop up ('cause lets have free beer)

3 - Ada suffers from the whole bondage vs cowboy programming theme that was so common in the early 90's. Where many could not grasp the benefits of type driven programming.

4 - You need a strong engineering background, specially on high integrity computing domain, to understand why Ada offers what it does

6 - Due to high integrity computing domain, Ada tends to be used in domains that many don't find cool, government contracts, train control systems, airplane avionics, pages long contracts with project management very waterfall like even when they pretend to be agile now

7 - It is definitely not a language for the Silicon Valley culture.

However thanks to Ada being there first, having the certified compilers, being deployed into production during the last 40 years, with the increasing number of security exploits, some companies have been adopting Ada, NVidia being one of them.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure-auto...

Two of the reasons, for why Ada and not Rust, was precisely the lack of maturity of Rust on high integrity computing and Ada being more approachable to their engineers. They did a webinar about the adoption process.

Potentially interestingly, it looks like there's ongoing work to get Ada compiling to wasm via LLVM too.

Hello World style demo:

https://blog.adacore.com/use-of-gnat-llvm-to-translate-ada-a...

Getting started with Ada is hard. The best compilers and runtime for it are commercial, and especially getting it to work in embedded (where it really shines) is not at all straightforward. I've looked at it a few times and never really been able to get anywhere useful with it, and came away with the impression the best way is to drop a few thousand on it or work on a government contract.

There's plenty of love for Ada, more than ever.

https://blog.adacore.com/the-emergence-of-a-new-ada-era

From my perspective, I'd say it's because there isn't much talk about Ada as a technology. It comes up a lot when Rust is discussed, but I never see details besides built-in ranges for numbers. I can't even remember ever hearing anything much about the library/tooling Ada ecosystem.

Also, Ada users seem to be more focused on technical content about safety/mission critical things, like this discussion. But this is a meta-area where no specific features or solutions are in focus. When there's a discussion about zero-copy parsing, compiler optimizations, platform support, scalability or any other everyday technical topic, noone knowing Ada seems to join in with their perspective and experience.

So my advice to the Ada community would be to talk more details, talk more about what you love. Tech is a big field and it's currently a lot of work to get to know Ada from the outside.

There's still tons of love for Ada at all the places where we spoke to.

Rust, Swift, Nim, Zig and other languages are the driver of a current resurgence of debates around the embedded toolstack, though, which Rust leading the pack by having the most upfront "we want to talk" messaging.

Ada is not cool. More seriously, GNAT crashed all the time in random ways when I tried it, and when I tried adacore on stm32, the timing functions were based on systick, that’s a non-starter for me, and I didn’t want to start learning a new system by re-implementing part of its internals.

Ada get plenty of love where it matters : actual industrial usage in critical systems.

It is not clear to me how the internet hype surrounding Rust which seems mostly driven by people coming from dynamic languages and former web developers actually translate to use where it counts.