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Comment by can3p | Hacker News Reader

I've read the book on ada language recently and it looked interesting, but the developer experience is a mess. IDE that' s provided got kicked out from ubuntu repositories due to complicated build process. Language server is there, but there is not much documentation in the wild and the community is quite small and the whole situation with gpl compiler affecting compiled programs is poisoning.

I think ada as a language is in a very similar place to common lisp - there are few commercial vendors (one in case of ada) that sell compiler(s) and support to companies with a lot of existing code, but not much new stuff happening apart from few enthusiasts.

=It's just my anecdotal experience tough.

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There are 7 commercial vendors for Ada.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

Ada is mostly used by professionals, not enthusiasts. It has a captive audience of governments and companies working on safety-critical systems where they have strict toolchain requirements or legacy systems. Pretty much the only thing that can move those users off Ada is to retire older systems, and rebuild their processes for C++. That's tough to justify when the language and ecosystem are still actively developed (paid, not free tools). Things like a language server are unimportant when your IDE must be qualified, and you're not allowed to install or use any software of your choosing. You will never see most of what goes on with Ada outside of a work environment. Its continued use is largely unaffected by anything you'd see in the open source community.

> Ada is mostly used by professionals, not enthusiasts.

A polite way of saying it's rarely used willingly.

It had no free complier for a long time and a good IDE is still quite expensive.

Overall, it's a pretty nice language.

GNAT has existed since 1996. It’s had a free compiler for a very long time.

Ada was released in 1980. It finally got a free compiler when the Air Force paid for one in 1995 fifteen years later and it took until 2001 for this code to finally be merged with the rest of GCC.

It definitely had no free compiler for a long time.

That it took 16 years to develop a free compiler for a relatively niche language in the era when relatively few people were online yet in any meaningful sense is not terribly shocking.

The language, going with the date of the first spec, is now 41 years old. So 25 years of its existence, there has been a free compiler. Quite a bit longer than the time spent without one.

That's not at all what I'm saying. Aside from web development, most professional tools are only used by professionals because they cost money. It wouldn't make sense to judge something by the free toy versions that happen to exist.

GNAT is far from a toy.

What language has a better type system?

Edit: the book => a book

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