[Jtsummers]

http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=Advo...

Specifically, I think these three paragraphs near the end are critical:

> I'm reading a great book now called Why People Believe Weird Things, by Micheal Shermer, in which the author explains what rational thinking is, and how skepticism is a process. Basically, people believe something because that want to, not because of any scientific arguments you make.

> There are guys out there who dislike Ada, but they do so because they want to, not because of any rational analysis of its merits or flaws. Sometimes even their arguments are factually incorrect, like saying that "Ada was designed by committee," ignoring the fact that Jean vetoed language design arguments that were 12-to-1 against him. It's not unlike creationists who explain the "fact" that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (No, it does not, as any book on freshman physics will tell you.)

> I've explained the reasons Ada why I think is not as popular as C++, and I'd like to hope that it will convince Ada's detractors that Ada isn't so bad after all. But as Robert Dewar pointed out, a person who has made an irrational decision probably isn't going to be swayed by rational arguments!

That is, people aren't really rational. A choice was made to dislike it, it entered into the culture and to this day people dislike it because they think they should dislike it. They don't even spend 5 minutes studying it to see that half of what they've heard (if not more) is flat out wrong. In several Ada discussions on HN people claim its syntax is like COBOL's, for instance. Not just similar in being keyword heavy, but practically the same. Sometimes they even provide Ada "examples" that won't even compile. That's the kind of nonsense that happens when people turn off their brains or refuse to turn on their brains. You see it in many Lisp discussions as well.

[pornel]

There may be lots of uninformed post-hoc rationalizations now, but it couldn't have started with everyone collectively deciding to irrationally dislike Ada, and not even try it. I suspect it's not even the ignorant slander that is the cause of Ada's unpopularity.

Other languages survive being called designed by committee or having ugly syntax. People talk shit about C++ all the time. PHP is still alive despite getting so much hate. However, there are rational reasons why these languages are used, they're just more complicated than beauty of the language itself, and are due to complex market forces, ecosystems, unique capabilities, etc.

I'm not qualified to answer why Ada isn't more popular, but an explanation implying there was nothing wrong with it, only everyone out of the blue decided to irrationally dislike it, seems shallow to me.

[ltbarcly3]

"Am I out of touch? No it's the children who are wrong."

This argument eats itself. It's just an accusation that people who disagree with you are irrational, and their arguments are in bad faith. It's not a valid argument because it doesn't even depend on any context or facts of the actual discussion which he's using it. It's the definition of cope.

In the end, even if we can't be sure why Ada failed, it failed spectacularly. It had massive institutional backing and never made it past obscurity. I don't know exactly why people dislike it so much, maybe because everyone already knew C, C was well supported, every single OS was written in C, etc, so trying to bring some incompatible algol like language (always a popular lineage hahaha) with very sparse to nonexistent tooling and very theoretical advantages, especially considering the huge performance disadvantage at the time on highly constrained resources of computers at the time was not likely to succeed on its face.

[Jtsummers]

This claim is false (when considered in context of the 1980s when the first Ada spec was released):

> every single OS was written in C.

No, they weren't. In fact, some were written in Algol-like languages such as Pascal.

[ltbarcly3]

The only exception I can think of is early versions of mac os, which was still primarily assembly. Even then i recall people went out of their way to use C despite needing pascal calling convention for system calls. They basically immediately regretted using pascal and started a march towards C and basically gave up on pascal before the powerpc.

So Pascal had one mainstream OS for about 10 years, most of which time it was being phased out.

[Jtsummers]

> which os was written in Pascal? most were written in assembly in that era, you are talking about some obscure research or toy.

Your first claim: Every OS was written in C. Your new claim: Most were written in assembly.

Pick a position. If most were written in assembly then it would not have had any impact on the adoption of Ada so why make the original claim?

I would respond to your question but you substantially edited your comment and removed the question. I also notice you removed the claim in your edit about most OSes being written in assembly in the 80s. Obnoxious way to communicate with people, altering your comments while they're replying so their replies look like random comments.

[KerrAvon]

> They basically immediately regretted using pascal and started a march towards C and basically gave up on pascal before the powerpc.

Nonsense. MPW Pascal and Think Pascal were well supported developer tools, and a lot of third-party developer code was written in them during the 80's. Photoshop (1987) was originally written in Pascal! Apple's Pascal dialect had object extensions that made OOP simpler than with C or standard Pascal.

Pascal started to leave the building circa 1991, when C++ became viable for OOP. Even then, Metrowerks CodeWarrior supported native Pascal compilation for PowerPC in 1993/4.

[throwaway81523]

People who didn't like C's unreliability in the 1990s used Java. That relegated Ada to a niche where GC wasn't wanted.

[MobiusHorizons]

That was a great read!

[Jtsummers]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824570 - The one time it's been submitted that I know of. 112 comments so a pretty good discussion.