[tombert]

Fair, I guess the list was “languages that I know were popular at one point but I don’t know anyone really using now”.

Ada definitely does seem pretty cool from the little bit I have read about it. I’m not sure why it’s fallen by the wayside in favor of C and its derivatives.

[johnnyjeans]

It's easy to get lost in the modern way we look at compilers and toolchains, but it wasn't always like this. Free compilers basically didn't exist 30+ years ago. Certainly none of the free compilers were good. For the longest time, your only options for Ada compilers were priced at government contractor-levels (think $10k per seat... in the 80s). It's also an extremely complicated language, while C isn't. A single, moderately skilled programmer who can at least make their own FSM parser can write a reasonably complete C compiler in the space of a month. There's no hand-rolling your own Ada compiler. Even just complying with SPARK is a herculean task for a team of experts.

This is much the same reason I'm highly skeptical of Rust as a replacement systems language to C. A multitude of very talented folk have been working on writing a second Rust compiler for years at this point. The simplicity and ease of bootstrapping C on any platform, without any special domain skills, was what made it absolutely killer. The LLVM promise of being easily ported just doesn't hold true. Making an LLVM backend is outrageously complicated in comparison to a rigid, non-optimizing C compiler, and it requires deep knowledge of how LLVM works in the first place.

[9659]

if gnat (the gnu ada translator) from NYU had come out 5 years earlier, ada might have caught on with the masses.

[aidenn0]

Ada was mandated by the DoD for a bit. My understanding is that, in practice, this involved making a half-hearted effort in Ada, failing and then applying for a variance to not use Ada.

[hardburn]

I actually met a programmer who worked on military jets. According to her, Ada is only used anymore for the older jets that were already programmed in it, and she worked in C++.

[greenavocado]

Military jets coded in C++. God help us all.

[FpUser]

No need to be so dramatic. Shitheads will make software fail in any language. Memory "safety" will not help you correctly and in timely manner calculate position of flight controls for example.

[User23]

One can write reliable, and I mean airtight good enough for medical devices and nuclear deterrence, in basically any even vaguely modern language (think Algol-60 or later). It’s simply a matter of disciplined design and running on hardware that’s sufficiently predictable.

[hardburn]

Most aerospace stuff is. The thing is, they have reams of very specific rules about how it's coded, how to verify that code, and how to verify the compiler of that code, and how to verify the code output from that compiler. It's not an easy process to replace, but its proven reliable just by all the commercial planes flying every day without falling out of the sky.

In theory, something like Rust could do the job instead, but they'd still have to verify the entire chain. Rust is for the rest of us to get something half as reliable as that while also being able to write more than two lines of code per day.

[9659]

yes, this is true. mainly due to a perceived lack of ada programmers on the market.

[actionfromafar]

Often, I'm sure, but there are large code bases in Ada still. It's a shame, it looks like a really great language I would love. But it's a chicken and egg problem. If only Mozilla had decided on Ada instead of Rust! :-)

[cyberax]

Ada doesn't offer any safety for dynamic memory. In fact, Ada is now adopting Rust's approach with the borrow checker.

[actionfromafar]

Great! Time to jump on the Ada bandwagon then! ;)