[cpp-threads] meta-question about Ada

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Ada has a peculiar position in that it is a language (in my perception) 
not backed up heavily by industry nor by academia. I can't explain that 
to myself.

Many languages embedding good ideas have caught on in at least one of { 
industry, academy }.

However, my understanding is that Ada currently hasn't caught on in the 
industry. Although Ada has freely-available implementations, there are 
few Ada programmers, zealots, aficionados, grass-rooters etc. Outside of 
the military, knowing Ada is not a marketable skill.

Also, Ada hasn't caught on in the academia. Note that this is very 
important. If Ada was interesting in any way, academists would be on it 
like white on rice, as they've been on various languages of little 
industrial appeal, such as Scheme, ML, Haskell, and the such. But a 
Google Scholar search on "Ada" returns practically no relevant results, 
and a search on "Ada tasks" returns papers from 1988, 1985, and 1983 as 
its top three hits. So there is not *one* nut in some research lab or 
university who loves Ada and works on it. (And believe me, in research 
labs and universities you can find nuts working on the weirdest things. 
The only precondition is that that things must somehow appear 
interesting, at least to the nut.)

So whenever I hear some good things about Ada, I can't go past this 
mental block: I'd need to put in serious effort to understand Ada's 
tasking mechanisms. However, people both in the industry and academia 
did not care for those, or Ada at large. Why?

While I am, very honestly, ashamed to admit giving in to an argument "ad 
populum" (which is a nice name for "prejudice"), I have to say: because 
of the reasons above, I am seriously biased towards thinking that Ada is 
not that interesting afterall.


Andrei