In 2010, Ada 2005 was the most bare-metal-worthy expressive language. Now that would be Ada 2022.

While at it: what was / is holding Ada back? I haven't seen a single open-source project built in Ada, nor did I hear about any closed-source corporate project that uses Ada's superpowers. (Most likely these exist! But I did not see any available, or at least well-publicized.)

People agree to go to great lengths to use a tool that has some kind of superpower, despite syntactic weirdness or tooling deficiencies. People study and use LISP descendants like Clojure, APL descendants like K, "academic" languages like Haskell and OCaml, they write hobby projects in niche languages like Nim or Odin, they even use even C++ templates.

Why is Ada so under-represented? It must have a very mature ecosystem. I suspect that it's just closed-source mostly, and the parties involved don't see much value in opening up. If so, Ada is never going to make it big, and will slowly retreat under the pressure of better-known open alternatives, even in entrenched areas like aerospace.

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pjmlp 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There are enough closed source corporate projects to keep 7 vendors in business, selling compilers, in an age developers hardly pay for their tools.

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 was too hardware demanding for the kind of computers people could afford at home, we could already do our Ada-like programming with Modula-2 and Object Pascal dialect hence how Ada lost home computing, and FreePascal/Delphi would be much more used today, had it not been for Borland getting too gready.

On big iron systems, espcially among UNIX vendors they always wanted extra bucks for Ada.

When Sun started the trend of UNIX vendors to charge for the developer tools as an additional SKU, Ada wasn't part of the package, rather an additional license on top, so when you already pay for C and C++ compilers, why would someone pay a few thousand (select currency) more if not required to do so, only because of feeling good writing safer software, back in the days no one cared about development cost of fixing security bugs.

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GhosT078 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ada has been held back primary by an image problem that traces back to the high cost and poor performance of a lot of early Ada 83 compilers. Ada adoption has never really recovered from that despite its many technical advantages, and despite the low cost and good performance of several current compilers.

The GNAT Ada compiler, always open source and quite good, has been freely available since the 1990's. It has been part of GCC since about 2003.

There are plenty of open source Ada projects on GitHub and other places although not nearly as many as some other languages.

The Ada ecosystem is mature and complete, particularly the GNAT related tools supported by directly or indirectly AdaCore (https://github.com/AdaCore and https://alire.ada.dev/).

The language evolution has been stable and is still on-going. I have worked primarily with Ada for 30 years. I still work on new Ada projects on a mid-sized team. Most of us just don't participate in forums like this.

	▲	specialist 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> early Ada 83 compilers IIRC, in response, DARPA (et al) did invest in compiler research. > adoption has never really recovered Ya. Timing. There's a brief window of opportunity for new languages (ideas) to catch on before the horde of "worse is better" solutions overwhelm the field.
	▲	pavon 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		For people who were actually interested in using Ada, the early poor tooling was the main impediment. However, I think the bigger issue is that it was moving directly against the cultural headwinds at the time. The immediate response I heard anytime Ada was mentioned was that it was a designed-by-committee language[1] that couldn't even be fully implemented due to a theoretically impossible specification[2]. It was made by a bunch of bureaucratic stiffs and was all about constraining the developer with stupid rules and bogging them down with verbosity. It was contrary to the freewheeling nature of the PC developer culture that sprung up in the 70's and continued through the 80's, and then evolved into the dot-com developers of the 90's and 00's. It took decades of wandering through the deserts of "Real Developers don't write buffer overflows" on one end, and "Performance doesn't matter, and a sufficiently smart compiler will provide it anyway" on the other to get to the point where mainstream developers wanted a language that combined the safety of high-level languages with the control of low-level languages. [1] This is false, it was selected in a contest with each entry developed independently. [2] True but overrated

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michaelcampbell 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> While at it: what was / is holding Ada back?

I have a pet theory that it shares the same thing as any heavily typed language; it's difficult. And people aren't willing to accept that when you get it to compile at all, it'll probably work fine.

So many developers (and many more middle management) are not willing to trade the longer term stability/lack of runtime errors for the quick-to-production ability of other languages.

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rz2k 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Take a look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824570

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sitzkrieg 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

excellent summary of the commercial side, and i personally think the open source tooling with alire got a LOT better. it's definitely worth checking out