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I don't understand why Ada never took off, it had everything you find in the modern languages: tasks, low-level bit manipulation, OS assembly language interface, packages, OOP-like, even its own build dependency system. And I just like it.
I bought the book for Ada 2005, and being the C++ fanboy I am, I seriously wish C++ adopted a whole bunch of Ada features. It seemed really strange with C++11 that there was all the hype about concepts that were ditched due to difficulty when Ada has a much more clean way to specify template requirements. Was it seriously that hard for the standards committee to look outside of C-like languages?
The only thing that still puts me off Ada is it's OO implementation. I still can't get my head around the rules of elaboration or the rules for getting the [type].[method] syntax to work.
I loved Ada, but it had the stigma of being government mandated. Worse, when PC Ada compilers were first introduced, the government wouldn't let them use the name "Ada" because they weren't certified to the spec (because DOS was... well, DOS).
Kiss of death.
My favorite Ada anecdote was the government commission to determine what was needed to make Ada a commercial success. Their recommendation to congress was to EITHER (1) invest $15 million in establishing an Ada promotions board, OR (2) invest nothing, because less that $15 million would fail.
Congress, inevitably, voted $10 million.
And that, boys and girls, explains it all. :-D
re: cost... true. I had "free access" to an excellent compiler and even had the pleasure and privilege of working on a VMS component written in Ada. I know the first iteration of Ada was not fully OOP (oop-like) but you could fudge it. Ahhh... I think I still have my Booch book lying around somewhere. 




Member since:
2005-07-06
...I haven't looked at it since it was first released. It wasn't easy to use on Windows at the time.
I don't understand why Ada never took off, it had everything you find in the modern languages: tasks, low-level bit manipulation, OS assembly language interface, packages, OOP-like, even its own build dependency system. And I just like it.
Edited 2012-09-04 22:11 UTC