[pron]

Algol 68 and Pascal weren't memory-safe, and as for Lisp, Smalltalk, and ML, their style of memory safety - based on GC - took over the world pretty much the second it became practical enough for widespread use.

It is true that some decisions people make aren't rational, and it may even be true that most decisions most people make aren't entirely rational, but the claim that the whole software market, which is under selective pressures, manages to make irrationally wrong decisions in a consistently biased way is quite extraordinary and highly unlikely. What is more likely is that the decisions are largely rational, just don't correspond to your preferences. It's like the VHS vs. Betamax story. Fans of the latter thought that the preference for the former was irrational because of the inferior picture quality, but VHS was superior in another respect - recording time - that mattered more to more people.

I was programming military applications in Ada in the nineties (also not memory-safe, BTW) and I can tell you we had very good reasons to switch to C++ at the time, even from a software correctness perspective (I'm not saying C++ still retains those particular advantages today).

If you think so many people who compete with each other make a decision you think is obviously irrational, it's likely that you're missing some information.

[heresie-dabord]

> What is more likely is that the decisions are largely rational, just don't correspond to your preferences.

Cyber Security itself is an example of this. It may seem rational to want guarantees of security for the entire supply chain. But that simply isn't possible in reality.

A professional effort is the judicious application of resources to the highest priorities. That includes care in design and testing. Applications built with C and C++ are running everywhere around the world, every minute of every day.

[daymanstep]

What were the reasons for switching from ADA to C++ if I may ask?

[pron]

The compiler was much faster, the tooling better, and it was easier to find knowledgeable programmers (we were spending quite a bit of time sifting through thick Ada reference manuals). Whatever correctness benefits Ada provided at the language level were more than made up for by C++'s productivity boosts (at the time) that allowed writing and running more tests and fixing bugs more quickly, resulting in code that was no less correct and easier to maintain and evolve to boot.

[sramsay64]

This was my experience of Ada as well. Beautiful language, that somehow seemed to combine the best parts of Haskell and C. But so difficult to find documentation online. C++ has it's footguns, but it's hard not to learn them all just from the background noise alone. The tooling and stackoverflow-ability makes C++ feel as fast to develop as a scripting language in comparison to Ada.

[elcritch]

I wonder if LLMs could change this calculus. Though Ada is in a situation where it likely doesn’t have much open source code to train on.