> Why do people seem to think Ada is painful? I have a possible explanation on this. A lot of people only know Ada in passing, from classes. For someone fluent

> Why do people seem to think Ada is painful? I have a possible explanation on this. A lot of people only know Ada in passing, from classes. For someone fluent in another language typically derived from C, the syntax is very new and frustrating initially. People normally comfortable with coding in their preferred language become newbies again, making a lot of frustrating mistakes. And they hate Ada for it. I've seen several persons being forced into using Ada for a longer time. Geek types, including two long haired ones. They all hated it initially, but after a while they all come to appreciate and enjoy it. Two of them ended up contributing to GNAT. The cross-over time is roughly around 6 months of full time work with Ada, so more than what you get from a class. So I guess Ada is different enough to be frustrating at first, and most people don't use it long enough to come over the initial shock and appreciate the good sides of the language. They just hate it, and stay with the "Ada is bondage" meme. Too bad. For any one interested in large software system design and languages, I recommend looking at the "Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language" book. Even if you don't like the result ;) it's an interesting analysis of the challenge of doing large, safety critical system software IMHO. Just read the latest version, the intial one (though interesting) is now dated and made some wrong bets, like using synchronous tasks as the base for concurrency because there was hope that a formal model enabling proving behavior would develop around it, and that never happened.