| I left C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++ out, because of the C compatibility. The price of commercial compilers wasn't the only issue with Ads. It never had any friends in the UNIX culture. UNIX culture always ignored safer system programming languages from the 60 and 70's. If the hacker culture bashes Java for being verbose, what would they say about Algol languages like Ada? Another problem was Ads was mainly a DoD thing, there were no commercial OSes using it. So you either used the system programming language of the OS, if you were lucky to access to the official SDK, or bought one you could afford. There was always an option to type it all in as well. So with these constraints it was hard to get Ada widely adopted. It is now mainly used in avionics, train control systems and high integrity systems. All areas that the common Starbucks coder usually doesn't care about. As for D there are some projects using it on micro-controllers, presented at D Conf 2014. In comparison to Rust, it might appeal to those that favour a C++ like syntax, interoperability with C++, GC support, great metaprogramming capabilities. I like both, and think there might be space for both of them. |
[ed1: eg: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/N-queens_problem#Ada compares pretty favourably/neutrally in my mind to the C++ version in terms of verbosity (or lack thereof). Unless one gets upset about "end loop" vs "}" ]
[ed3: Hm, I guess looking at: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Balanced_brackets#Ada I could see Ada as being derided as verbose... maybe :-) ]
[ed2: And looking a bit more at rosettacode, I now found:
http://forge.ada-ru.org/matreshka (Quite unrelated to the rest of the discussion here, but anyone else interested in poking at Ada might find it interesting) ]