Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days (2024)

This argument eats itself. It's just an accusation that people who disagree with you are irrational, and their arguments are in bad faith. It's not a valid argument because it doesn't even depend on any context or facts of the actual discussion which he's using it. It's the definition of cope.

In the end, even if we can't be sure why Ada failed, it failed spectacularly. It had massive institutional backing and never made it past obscurity. I don't know exactly why people dislike it so much, maybe because everyone already knew C, C was well supported, every single OS was written in C, etc, so trying to bring some incompatible algol like language (always a popular lineage hahaha) with very sparse to nonexistent tooling and very theoretical advantages, especially considering the huge performance disadvantage at the time on highly constrained resources of computers at the time was not likely to succeed on its face.

This report is of interest to you:

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/1#vii

> It is in this context that Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) Emmett Paige, Jr., requested that the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) review DOD's current programming language policy. Convened by CSTB, the Committee on the Past and Present Contexts for the Use of Ada in the Department of Defense was asked to:

> * Review DOD's original (mid-1970s) goals and strategy for the Ada program;

> * Compare and contrast the past and present environments for DOD software development; and

> *Consider alternatives and propose a refined set of goals, objectives, and approaches better suited to meeting DOD's software needs in the face of ongoing technological change.

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167... is an article from 1997 about this, and here's what it has to say:

> Paige says he believes industry engineers will be more likely to accept the benefits of using Ada if DOD leaders recommend, not require, the language. Software engineers, who would rather choose a language based on its merits rather than because of a governmental mandate, historically have resisted the Ada mandate on principle.

and

> Chief complaints about Ada since it first became a military-wide standard in 1983 centered on the perception among industry software engineers that DOD officials were "shoving Ada down our throats."

This is basically the story: The DoD tried to mandate it, people resisted, and made liberal use of the ability to be granted an exception, and so they eventually gave up.

The first link contains much more nuance, some excerpts:

> In decisions affecting adoption of programming languages, non-technical factors often dominate specific technical features. These factors include the broad availability of inexpensive compilers and related tools for a wide variety of computing environments, as well as the availability of texts and related training materials. In addition, grass-roots advocacy by an enthusiastic group of early users, especially in educational and research institutions, often has broad influence on adoption of programming languages. These advantages were largely absent when Ada was introduced in 1980. In contrast, C++ and Java both have achieved widespread acceptance and use. The strong military orientation of the publicity generated for Ada also may have served to alienate significant portions of the academic and research communities.

> Ada has not been widely taught in colleges and universities, particularly compared with Pascal, C, and C++; until recently, even the military academies taught programming in languages other than Ada

> Historically, compilers and other language-specific tools for Ada have been significantly more costly and slower in coming to market than those for C and C++.

> Software engineers are likely to be interested in enhancing skills that they expect to be most valuable in the software engineering marketplace, which is now dominated by commercial opportunities. Thus, programmers have moved quickly to learn Java and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML; used to develop pages for the World Wide Web) because they see these as the next wave, which can carry them to new career opportunities. Similarly, software engineers might avoid using Ada if they see it as limiting their careers.

Its syntax and concepts were considered solid and so was selected as the basis of the VHDL hardware description language, also successful in its domain.

Other languages survive being called designed by committee or having ugly syntax. People talk shit about C++ all the time. PHP is still alive despite getting so much hate. However, there are rational reasons why these languages are used, they're just more complicated than beauty of the language itself, and are due to complex market forces, ecosystems, unique capabilities, etc.

I'm not qualified to answer why Ada isn't more popular, but an explanation implying there was nothing wrong with it, only everyone out of the blue decided to irrationally dislike it, seems shallow to me.