[lenkite]

I never even knew that this "Ancient Language" had dependent types. Always thought it was a "modern" invention of snazzy newer academic languages like Idris, etc.

But, its easy to figure out why it didn't become popular. C/C++/any other top10 language all had free compilers available to everyone. Ada didn't during the explosive era of computing expansion. Also, not a problem nowadays with IDE auto-complete/snippets but the language was too verbose for older generation of programmers.

[samatman]

Verbosity was genuinely expensive at the time. Two ways: until the mid-80s, 5 1/4" floppies held between 100 and 250kB depending on format, so a program which used up three times as many bytes (I think that's a good multiplier from C to Ada) is making a meaningful difference for transfer, backups, storage.

What's probably more important is that 80 columns was far and away the likely maximum for a screen, and 40 columns wasn't unheard of. The word PROCEDURE took up 11 to 22% of the column width! This wasn't a show-stopper, Pascal uses a similar syntax (both of them derived from Algol of course) and was pretty popular, but plenty of people complained about Pascal's verbosity as well, and Ada is definitely more verbose than even Pascal.

The lack of autocomplete (even things like snippets were relatively uncommon) didn't help, but mainly, verbosity imposed real costs which are mitigated or irrelevant now.

[Lucretia9]

You talk about C and C++ yet call Ada "ancient," C from 1969 and C++ from 1979.

Whereas Ada's first version is from 1980 and first standardised version (different to 1980) in 1983. Yeah, "ancient."