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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

Because they are not as good of a fit. Rust strikes an extremely good balance between memory safety and productivity. Also almost nobody knows Ada, and even fewer the flavor you mentioned

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Are we concerned with memory safety and security or popularity?

Both SPARK and Rust provide memory safety, so it's perfectly reasonable to use popularity as a "tie breaker". Applications are written by people; the more people who can usefully contribute, the more work can be done.

What’s your source saying more people write Rust than Ada? There are people outside HN.

The TIOBE index’s[0] methodology is definitely flawed but it currently lists Rust at 19 and Ada at 22. No mention of SPARK.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

If you use a flawed metric that measures nothing of note noting relative position is not illuminating.

> What’s your source saying more people write Rust than Ada?

I think this "popularity" reasoning is flawed. It completely misses the context of the tool. Just ask yourself -- are there many UNIX CLI tools written in Ada/SPARK? I'm sure there are some, but not aware of any I use regularly.

Meanwhile, there is a Cambrian explosion of Rust CLI tools taking place.

"Popularity" is really a surrogate for "popular, accessible, infrastructure for an OSS CLI tool for UNIX", a place where Ada AFAIK has not been a first choice. If we were building firmware for a missile guidance computer, maybe the reasoning would be different?

But it's still not a sufficient reason, so I'll add another: People really like using Rust to make these types of tools. It's amazing to me that people are so willing to discount as non-technical, and therefore unworthy of discussion, lots of people really like using Rust.

In my other comment I wrote "open source ecosystem" in order to avoid all the speculation about how much SPARK is used in commercial avionics and whatnot.

Seems obvious to me that ease of installation seems also is a factor where popularity can have an impact. If one is more popular that increases the likely hood that users will already be familiar with installation methods (ignoring actual difficulty), reaching more people in the process.

SPARK goes further though. More advanced properties besides memory safety can be proven. This seems tremendously useful for something like sudo.

Maintainability is the other issue.

Apparently both.

Computer languages are partially to communicate between people and computers, and partially to communicate among people.

Exactly. The point of a programming language is to translate human intention into machine instructions.

Whatever optimizes for the accuracy of the instruction output is the best. Sometimes it means language features. But it can also mean its popularity so you can get many more human eyes on the same bits of code.

“Popularity” is quite important for security too as more people can vet the software and maintain it.

You overestimate how many people know rust.

The 2022 SO survey puts it as one of the most popular languages, and spark or ada don’t even make the list

SO surveys are more indicative of how many people are aware of it and think it’s cool than how many people actually use it in anger.

You're making this comment in comparison with ada?

Maybe we also underestimate how many people know Ada… doubtful but not impossible

I imagine the number of Ada people is decently high but hidden.

But more importantly, how many of them are contributing to open source is lower (or at least advertising that they know Ada & contributing)

Lots of people seem to be learning Rust judging by the last few years of Advent of Code.

In a safe language like Rust, the level of capability you get doing even say the first couple of weeks of AoC is enough that your small contributions to a project are likely to actually work and be more or less serviceable, so that's a huge help.

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