[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.