why Ada didn't take the world? It was literally first programming language taught at university.
- Compiler prices
- The few UNIX vendors that supported it like Sun, it was extra on top of C and C++ compilers, why pay more when C and C++ were already in the box
- Hardware requirements
Still, there are around 7 Ada vendors around.
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
- Of my quick scan, only AdaCore supports Ada 2012 (where a lot of the really good stuff is implemented) the rest are stuck on Ada 95.
- None of the vendors seem to list transparent pricing.
If you are only selling based on volume and through a sales rep then you are off the bat excluding most startups, SMEs, and just general bootstrap curious folks.
There are at least two more supporting Ada 2012, if you go into their docs.
https://www.adacore.com/community
But yes GNAT "just" supports Ada 2012, 2005, 95 and 83:
Adacore technically retired the Community version a few years ago, so the most up-to-date free version would be GNAT from FSF (which is what Alire brings in automatically with `alr toolchains --select`).
Just clarifying for other folks.
https://learn.adacore.com/courses/whats-new-in-ada-2022/chap...
How many would pay for a Rust compiler?
- Ada is only a small part of what Green Hills offers.
- PTC mostly isn't even a development tools company, their main products are PLM and CAD (WindChill and Creo).
- I think RR is a one-man company.
As for who would pay for a Rust compiler: probably not a whole lot of people unless that compiler has something special the offer that the normal compiler does not.
The same goes for a C compiler, there are Intel compilers that are supposed to be 'better', but as it turns out, in most cases not 'better' enough for people to pay for them. But even then, I would not be surprised if more people pay for the ICC than for Ada (but I would also not be surprised if the Ada compiler sales rack up more money than the ICC sales).
I'd say the biggest hurdle is that Ada is a very complex language to implement. I've been writing Ada for more than 20 years, and writing static analysis tools for 5 years with libadalang (an amazing toolbox...) now and I still find it hard to grasp the whole combinatrics of features.
Easy to use, but very hard to implement.
I wonder if there's a deno/bun style business in here. Would be cool to see Ada compete with Go/nodejs/java etc. Or do you think that would be a terrible fit for the language?
We can look at the size of the GCC frontends for various languages to get some idea of the complexity compared to other languages:
gcc/ada/*.ad* : 712194 lines (excludes C files and gcc-interface folder)
gcc/ada/libgnat/ : 438117 lines (standard library)
gcc/ada/libgnarl/ : 61705 lines (runtime)
gcc/c/ : 63816 lines
gcc/cp/ : 279732 lines
gcc/c-family/ : 53110 lines
gcc/d/ : 212457 lines (185253 are DMD)
> I wonder if there's a deno/bun style business in here.
You could do this with a library without anything special in Ada. You don't need to dig deep in to the internals like you do with JS.
The ironic thing is that Ada was designed to be cost effective over a projects lifetime. C costs you a lot further down the line.
I know Boeing is technically a space company these days, but they weren't when they created the 777. Several of its systems are written in Ada, including the cockpit interfaces, electrical generator systems, and primary flight computers.
Problem is, web is the new BASIC and many devs will start there and they will see rust first. And where's that ADA game engine ?
ADA can definitely claim tons of successes and very powerful constructs, but mindhsare is clearly not one of its selling points.
This presentation in particular was in the Ada dev room at FOSDEM (I gave a presentation in that room as well), and there were over 100 people there; we actually ran out of seats in the auditorium.
- marketing;
- big companies using it;
- familiarity;
- history of the creators;
- history of the influencing languages;
- timing;
- luck;
- regional usage;
- etc.
These are the deciding factors.
If you look at which newish languages have gotten popular over the last few years, it was Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Go and Typescript.
Building a language and ecosystem around it takes a huge amount of resources, and often tedious work that doesn't happen if people aren't paid for it.
The street cred of "hey, large company X is using it, it must be good" is also very important.
(of course Swift and Kotlin are somewhat distinct as the platform languages for Android and iOS)
Yes, and also, "large company X is spending lots of money on it, so they aren't just going to abandon it once it's no longer the newest, coolest thing."
ADA was way ahead of its time, thus compilers were slow and ressource (RAM) hungry, and worse: they were inaccessible for hobbyists or learners.
In contrast, pascal/turbo pascal was ubiquitous, and then turbo c++. You easily knew someone who could organize a copy and "keys" for it.
Do you mean "It was literally first programming language I was taught at university."? because the first language ever taught was more likely to be one of the autocoder/assembly variants, or FORTRAN.
Edited to expand: For a First Language you can choose to pick a language that you don't expect your students will actually end up using, for pedagogic reasons, just as we might spend time proving fundamental things in Mathematics even though those are already proved and you'll never do that "in real life" after studying, a language which has good properties for learning about programming is not necessarily also the right language to actually write yet another web site, database front end, AI chat bot and video streaming service.
I've spent considerable time thinking about this and I believe Oxford and Cambridge were right to choose an ML as First Language. The MLs have desirable properties for teaching, even if you expect your students to end up writing Python or C++ after they graduate. I am entirely certain that my exposure to an ML at University made it much easier to pick up Rust than it was for people whose nearest previous languages were C and C++
Unfortunately the lecturer that ran the unit retired the year I started my degree and by the time I had the prereqs required to do the course the faculty had run the course once without the original lecturer and it was apparently a disaster so they canned the unit until it could be rewritten from scratch, sans train set ... and in Java.
I still think about missing out on programming a train set. Years later
It’s not quite the same as having physical access to the train set, but a student eventually wrote a simulator for the Märklin train set [0]. Another student wrote an emulator for the TS-7200 used for the class [1] if you don’t want to test your kernel in QEMU.
Sounds like a nice hobby project to indulge in during your free time! It's easier than it has ever been, and it's a nice rabbit hole do dive into.
They even have open-source DCC decoders nowadays!
https://www.opendcc.de/elektronik/opendecoder/opendecoder_e....
https://ilabs.se/news/introducing-our-new-open-source-dcc-de...
- "the common dev" isn't familiar with it
as well the hen/egg (half) problem of
- if most users are "specialists" then you don't need compiler/tooling/doc with very good UX for non specialists, but until you have very neat UX even for non specialists you will not get a lot of traction with non specialists and in turn it might seem pointless to fix the UX
I say half problem because in my experience fixing it is also beneficial for "specialists".
This problem also overlaps with perceived (and sometimes actual) gate keeping and/or elitism.
Basically the same reasons why e.g. Haskell is much less widely used then it could be (and why most usage is in companies mostly filled up with people from Universities which have it as a required (or strongly recommended) course.
Just with more issues (listed in some of the other responses) added on top of it.
This is critical. Once I realized that even experts didn't necessarily have homogeneous advanced knowledge of the entire language, it became easier to justify to myself spending time on improving the diagnostics of uncommon errors for clarity and learnability. An expert requires less explanation, but they still require one.
And I also suspect that spending time on better DX at the right time of the adoption curve has an outsized impact on it.
The bad part is that it is a hard, slow, endless and somewhat thankless job (you're going against the grain of the compiler design half the time, adding logic that needs to be maintained, and for every case you handle ten more pop up elsewhere that need to be handled in a different way).
This is a good thing to have a test suite for a language but from a business perspective it increases barrier to entry, why? 1/ you start your new compiler with 10000 bugs (the failing tests in the public test suite) 2/ you get no client since clients want a compiler passing the public test suite 3/ no client means no money and this until you fix the 10000 bugs.
With programming languages that do not have a credible public test suite you can get away with shipping the compiler ASAP and get money from customers, then concentrate on fixing customer impacting bugs.
All in all a blessing and a curse, life is full of compromises :)
This is a common complaint I read, and I have never understood it.
My eyes are not strong: I wear spectacles of about -6.5 dioptres.
If text size is fairly small, it is REALLY difficult to distinguish
(...)
from
{...}
... on large screensful of text. And
[...]
... is not much more visible. Making that significant is terse, yes, but Sendmail is terse. Terseness is not an unambiguous virtue.
Secondly, indentation: I learned 2 or 3 languages in the 1980s before I learned C, and it's a given that you indent opening and closing control structures to match. That's how it works: you structure blocks of code to show the hierarchies.
But most curly-bracket language coders have their own weird schemes where the opening { is in a totally different column from the closing }. And they fight like alley cats about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style
ONLY the GNU style listed there is sane.
I mean at least Allman and Horstmann styles are consistent.
It is much MUCH easier to pick out
BEGIN
... stuff...
... than it is to try to pick out { and } in some random blasted column.
And yet, all the fans squee at curly brackets. As smdiehl wisely said:
« C syntax is magical programmer catnip. You sprinkle it on anything and it suddenly becomes "practical" and "readable". »
https://x.com/smdiehl/status/855827759872045056
I never got it. It's obfuscatory. It is famed for being write-only. There's a competition to write the least-readable C!
C style hurts my eyes.
Pascal and Ada are vastly more readable.
That is not terribly germane here, IMHO.
A pair of readable words, words that of different lengths so are easily distinguishable without reading them characer-by-character, are far more legible than a pair of line-noise characters -- especially if those characters on their own have wildly different meanings in the language, and -- to make matters even worse -- are also extremely close to the characters for code comments!
Look, to spell this out:
You have your own opinion and that is fine. You are perfectly entitled to it.
But you are making out that your preference is some global truth, and I think you need to realise that what is easier or clearer for you is in fact less clear and much LESS readable for other people.
Those words were chosen for good reasons and have persisted through whole generations of programming languages for something like half a century, and there are good reasons for this.
The C designers chose things shorter and easier to type and that is their privilege. I personally, and thousands of others, dislike their choice and prefer Wirth's.
Nobody is absolutely objectively right or wrong here.
The point is that there are good reasons for both choices, and nobody -- including me -- gets to go and say one is better and clearer and the other is worse.
What you like, I hate. What I like, you hate. But we both have our reasons. I think mine are good reasons. Presumably you think yours are, although you haven't explained them. You just assert them as obvious global truths. They are not.