Also, they seemingly already had a BWT lying around (which is seemingly not counted in “from scratch in a couple of days”), and there is no mention of speed.
Do you have sources you could point to? I once read that it's a great language mired by a designed by committee ecosystem. I really liked the language when I tinkered with it a bunch around 2010 but moved on after work pushed me to other languages like C# for GUI stuff. First language I used with simple built in concurrency.
For my safety-critical automation software for a machine that will operate around people and overhead, I’m choosing Ada/SPARK2014. Its decades-long track record in high-integrity domains like aerospace, defense, and medical systems ensures reliability for applications where human safety is paramount. SPARK2014’s formal verification tools mathematically prove the absence of runtime errors, aligning with standards like DO-178C and ISO 26262, critical for my Q3 2026 market deadline. While Rust is gaining traction for memory safety, its formal verification tools, like LEAN/Aeneas, are still maturing and lack the production-ready ecosystem of Ada/SPARK2014. Ada’s clear, structured syntax simplifies code reviews, and its tooling generates certification reports familiar to regulators, streamlining approval processes. For my project’s safety and business needs, Ada/SPARK2014 is the proven choice - for now. I am not a fan of Rust syntax or complexity, but that is somewhat subjective. I last dove in about 2 years ago.
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.
"Am I out of touch? No it's the children who are wrong."
This argument eats itself. It's just an accusation that people wbo 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.
Well that was disappointing. I was hoping to see a discussion about writing a zip encoder in Ada. How the language was used, values of the language for this kind of work. How it’s easier or harder to do. Maybe a bunch of Ada source code.
Simply as one who does not use Ada I had hoped to be a bit more informed about it.
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