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I recall Ada being strongly pushed, but at the time you needed a top of the line workstation ($60K - 100K in early 1990s dollars) and the per seat license for t
by tomohawk 2y ago
I recall Ada being strongly pushed, but at the time you needed a top of the line workstation ($60K - 100K in early 1990s dollars) and the per seat license for the compiler and other tooling was another $100K. And that was aside from the much longer/harder path to getting to a solution. We had two teams implement a system - one in C and one in Ada. The teams didn't know they were in competition with one another, but the much less experienced C team completed their solution so much faster than the Ada team, that they just dropped the Ada effort as unrealistic for use outside of specialized aerospace.
- MaxBarraclough 2y agoI agree that the late arrival of a serious Free and Open Source Ada compiler did tremendous damage to Ada's adoption. I still think it reflects poorly on the software development community that Ada has been almost completely ignored despite that obstacle having been resolved decades ago. > The teams didn't know they were in competition with one another, but the much less experienced C team completed their solution so much faster than the Ada team, that they just dropped the Ada effort I realise you've given an abbreviated account, but it implies that: 1. No regard was paid to the relative quality of the 2 solutions 2. They ignored that initial development effort tends to be outweighed by ongoing development and maintenance 3. Many programmers are already familiar with C but not with Ada