> I love Ada, but sadly it probably missed its chance. There’s always the stories about how expensive the compilers were (and I think even now there’s some sort

> I love Ada, but sadly it probably missed its chance. There’s always the stories about how expensive the compilers were (and I think even now there’s some sort of weird license issues with GNAT and the Adacore tools) Not just Ada. There was a lot of buzz and excitement in mid- to late 90s about the design by contract paradigm (pre- and post-conditions, class invariants, generics, multiple inheritance done right, plus other nice things such as retriable and «self-healing» exceptions) and OOP that Bertrand Meyer had introduced with Eiffel and wrote a few books about. Sadly, nearly all languages have been relegated into oblivion or obscurity stemming from the proprietary nature of their respective compilers and development tools, which has entailed exorbitant costs of compilers and development toolchains. I was infatuated for a while with Sather, which was a Berkeley university open-source answer to Eiffel, however the language did not see any uptake in the development community and has succumbed to the same fate of other experimental languages. Ada has had pre- and post-conditions since day 1 (if my memory serves well), but the expensive compilers have relegated the language to fringe use cases as well. Even if at least a few of the design by contract ideas had gone mainstream (pre-, post-conditions, invariants at the very least), we would not have got carried away with the TDD now, writing unit tests verifying that 1 == 1 whilst allowing smart contracts to have farcical bugs. The rise of worse is better, ftw.