Why past tense? Because it's dead as languages go. Defining "death" as "zero users" is not the definition most people use, because it's not useful; things are clearly dead before that point. Ada doesn't have a bright future. It isn't going to rise from the ashes and have everyone agree that yes, it was right all along, and everybody with 10 years of experience on their resume is suddenly in hot demand as the crowds give them ticker tape parades for having been right all along. That never happens. It may well klunk along for more decades... but it's dead.
What does happen with such languages is that someone comes along and creates some sort of new language taking the best of the old language and mixing it with more modern stuff. I personally think there's an Ada-like niche waiting to be exploited there, probably something that also takes some lessons from Haskell. (Haskell is still alive, but IMHO, headed toward this sort of dead right now, and really could use this sort of revival itself.) An example of this is Elixir... Erlang would probably be also something I'd be calling "dead" if it weren't for Elixir.
(Ironically, often the biggest partisans of the base language are the last to know about the revival language because every deviation from the base language is seen as a flaw from the One True Answer....)
Ada should be considered dead because it doesn't have an npm full of super[1] useful[2] libraries?
> That never happens. It may well klunk along for more decades... but it's dead
Ada is used in 2021 in the exact same places that Ada was used in 2011 (and 2001 before it), if not more. Ada was designed for a specific purpose, one that it still fulfills very well. People have been claiming Ada was dead for decades, yet still it miraculously lives on. Despite Rust, despite Haskell, despite an algal bloom of "formally verifiable subsets of C", and so on.
> What does happen with such languages is that someone comes along and...
Yet... This just... hasn't happened. A successor language more suitable for safety-critical development has just simply not appeared. The manufacturers using Ada —a subset of which can be seen at this[3] link— ostensibly don't seem convinced that any of Ada's many alternatives offer a more appropriate solution for developing safety-critical software.
> I personally think there's an Ada-like niche waiting to be exploited...
The Ada-like niche you describe is, believe it or not, currently occupied by Ada. Ridiculous as this may sound, Ada is actually pretty good at fulfilling its intended function. What needs to change? Ada is not designed to fill the role of Node.js, Java, or C#. It's designed for safety-critical embedded systems, which is where you're most likely to find it today.
> Ironically, often the biggest partisans of the base language are the last to know about the revival language because every deviation from the base language is seen as a flaw from the One True Answer...
Does this apply to your thinking too, or just the proponents of Ada, and other languages you don't like? Are the Rust users just blind to the benefits of Ada? Are you susceptible to the same cognitive blind-spot you accuse us of having?
> Ada should be considered dead because it doesn't have an npm full of super[1] useful[2] libraries?
Wait! There is Alire[1][2]! There is a list of "crates", you can easily include them into your project, and so forth. This is pretty much the same as https://crates.io or https://pkg.go.dev, which means people really should throw their misconceptions away and actually do some research before concluding that the language (Ada) is dead. A couple of quick searches quickly tells me that Ada is pretty much alive, with all of these "modern libraries with modern solutions", and full-on safety without performance loss.
This comment is intended for the person you replied to. :)
Yeah. "Not just quite as slick". What does it even mean? Ada/SPARK has everything you would find in a modern language... and more. People hold lots of misconceptions over the language, that is why I often bring it up and talk about it. That is why I often provide links to stuff people would easily find if they were to look stuff up about the language. As I said in my other comment, it even has a package manager: https://alire.ada.dev/.
Now, I know that there is a trendy view of "the more the better", and it does not have as many libraries there, but that has to do with the fact that it is not yet widespread among Ada users. Alire is really new.
What does happen with such languages is that someone comes along and creates some sort of new language taking the best of the old language and mixing it with more modern stuff. I personally think there's an Ada-like niche waiting to be exploited there, probably something that also takes some lessons from Haskell. (Haskell is still alive, but IMHO, headed toward this sort of dead right now, and really could use this sort of revival itself.) An example of this is Elixir... Erlang would probably be also something I'd be calling "dead" if it weren't for Elixir.
(Ironically, often the biggest partisans of the base language are the last to know about the revival language because every deviation from the base language is seen as a flaw from the One True Answer....)