As used in zillions of aircraft, defense, and aerospace systems, it succeeded wildly. It's not Javascript because not every language needs to serve all stakeholders. Tools in the toolbox, not all-or-nothing religious factions that only "matter" if they ride a hype popularity train. There are many critical technologies all around that are little known.
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.
Thanks for the feedback. Multiple posts are planned on that topic. For parts 1 and 2 (so far the only ones existing) I preferred explaining the context and the remarkable simplicity of the BZip2 format. In part #4, I will try to show why the customisable types in Ada fit so well compression software.
Be patient: writing articles about writing software takes much more time than writing the software itself!
In the meantime, there is a short preview of that in recent presentations - notably FOSDEM 2025: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5148-adve... , last slide.
I think Ada is a great language and it is completely possible that Ada will experience a resurgence in coming years.. especially as LLM's are used more and more to generate software. ADA/Spark can provide very robust guide rails for correctness (so can Rust) of 'AI' generated code.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 24.5 ms ] threadIt seemed like it should have been the standard for a lot of desktop applications for the 90's and 2000's.
Simply as one who does not use Ada I had hoped to be a bit more informed about it.