4 ms·

Off topic, but curious why Ada went?

• thecosmicfrog 5y ago
  Would also be curious to know this. I had heard (anecdotally) that Ada is commonplace in aerospace tech.
  • MetricExpansion 5y ago
    I only have limited experience, but I’ve seen projects migrate from Ada to C++ more often than the other way around. If I had to guess why, it’s probably because it’s easier to hire for.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      As counter example, NVidia a C++ powerhouse, is using Ada for their autonomous vehicles firmware.
• pyjarrett 5y ago
  Ada relied on colleges teaching it or Pascal, so then it became hard to hire. I understand the rationale behind this, but the language is surprisingly easy to learn because it's usually explicit and straightforward. It suffered from two decades of bad press due to being forced by the DoD and then almost two decades of no press. Looking at Google ngrams, C (due to Unix) took big chunks out of it and then Java gave the death blow by becoming a major teaching language. Ada 2012 had the capability to do for Ada what C++11 did for C++, but it wasn't sold well. I picked up Ada 2012 last year and made a tool I use everyday now for real work--it's not a bad language. It suffers from a lot of myths about it, but the tool modernization like getting a package manager makes it productive. It is "boring" in the sense that there's nothing flashy about it, and its surface verboseness which saves other code later, and lack of curly braces turns people off. The community is super small and nice, but it never learned to sell the benefits of the language.