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Although the editor of the jargon file was confident he was able to speak for all "Hackers", I'm not sure they were ever quite as narrow-minded as he likes to m

Although the editor of the jargon file was confident he was able to speak for all "Hackers", I'm not sure they were ever quite as narrow-minded as he likes to make out. (Many of the early criticisms of Ada seem a bit silly in hindsight. For example people used to like to make a big thing of it taking three or four years for fully standards-compliant compilers to appear, which seems pretty good going compared to, say, C++98. Similarly, hardware from the early 80s sometimes struggled to compile Ada code efficiently, but it turns out that processors were getting faster rather rapidly around that time.)

kmill 7y ago
Also, something I'd read before (though I can't find a reference now) is that the "design by committee" was that everything filtered through Jean Ichbiah (I think), who acted as benevolent dictator for the design process, and he was careful about the features forming a cohesive whole. Another thing was a take on the Jargon File entry where a good amount of hacker backlash was due to it being a language forced by the DoD, so of course it is going to be bad.