[necroforest]

Does anyone use Ada in 2023? Back in college (~2008), I had a prof who was obsessed with it but AFAIK almost nobody used it even back them.

[pjmlp]

Enough to keep 7 commercial vendors in business.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

[thesuperbigfrog]

>> Does anyone use Ada in 2023?

https://www.adacore.com/industries

Ada is used for situations where the code has to work or people die.

That makes it niche compared to other programming languages where it is okay to "panic" or "fail fast".

Different tools for different needs.

[musicale]

> Ada is used for situations where the code has to work or people die.

C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Python/etc. are used in situations where code doesn't have to be reliable, secure, or correct.

If customers actually cared about any of those things then our favorite tech companies wouldn't be worth zillions of dollars.

[Jtsummers]

Aerospace, defense, and safety critical systems still use it. It's less common these days but still out there. Ada 2012 is pretty nice if you're going to be writing imperative/procedural code anyways.

[windexh8er]

I worked for a defensive contractor in the early 2000s. We had MS2 and ATC programs in our facility. Anything that had to do with the operations of ATC was written in ADA. Almost all the guys I worked with went to school at Embry Riddle. Pretty sure those systems are still written in ADA.

[frankreyes]

> It's less common these days

Was Ada replaced by something else? What do they use?

[stock_toaster]

Apparently NVDIA does - https://devclass.com/2022/11/08/spark-as-good-as-rust-for-sa...

[kokorozasu]

I graduated recently and my first project out of college was in Ada. It was defense-related. I have also heard rumors of banks still having some ada code.

My impression of the language is that it is a lot close to C than other languages like Java or Rust.

[ajdude]

The latest version of the Ada standard came out in 2022. It has its own package manager similar to Cargo and I'm actively working in Ada. Favorite language.

[evertedsphere]

I work for a bank in Europe, and we have a large Ada project that does a lot of number crunching and is extensively depended on.

[asddubs]

The GHDL compiler/simulator is written in ada. I suppose this makes sense since VHDL shares a lot of syntax with Ada

[ttoinou]

In France I did learn Ada at computer science school. Maybe because it is useful for the aerospace and aviation industry ? Or because teachers were used to it and deemed it was great to learn programming in a rigorous manner.

I have to say at least when you're coding in Ada there is no ideological fights over functional programming or silly design patterns from OOP. Refreshing.

[kokorozasu]

The ideological fight that occurred at my job where the project was in Ada was that the most senior programmer didn't want to use git.

[FpUser]

The same question can be asked about many languages that are very actively used. Just not by web army.

From my personal experience - I use many languages and I mostly base my choice on perceived ROI for particular project / situation. I could not give a flying fuck if "anyone still uses those in 2023" .

[yjftsjthsd-h]

ROI is substantially influenced by the ecosystem; the more libraries and documentation are published, the better the ROI.

[SnorkelTan]

My understanding is it's used in embedded and real-time systems domains. It came out of the DoD apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)

[Rebelgecko]

I think it's still somewhat common in defense and safety of life type applications, and not much outside of those niches