[9659]

Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples.

I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.

[johnnyjeans]

Ada will probably go the way of the dodo as Dependent types catch on. It's phenomenal how ahead of it's time it was, and continues to be. Contracts are an absolute killer feature, and I see a lot of people who are otherwise very serious about memory safety scoff about logical safety, not understanding just how powerful that construct really is.

[tombert]

Fair, I guess the list was “languages that I know were popular at one point but I don’t know anyone really using now”.

Ada definitely does seem pretty cool from the little bit I have read about it. I’m not sure why it’s fallen by the wayside in favor of C and its derivatives.

[johnnyjeans]

It's easy to get lost in the modern way we look at compilers and toolchains, but it wasn't always like this. Free compilers basically didn't exist 30+ years ago. Certainly none of the free compilers were good. For the longest time, your only options for Ada compilers were priced at government contractor-levels (think $10k per seat... in the 80s). It's also an extremely complicated language, while C isn't. A single, moderately skilled programmer who can at least make their own FSM parser can write a reasonably complete C compiler in the space of a month. There's no hand-rolling your own Ada compiler. Even just complying with SPARK is a herculean task for a team of experts.

This is much the same reason I'm highly skeptical of Rust as a replacement systems language to C. A multitude of very talented folk have been working on writing a second Rust compiler for years at this point. The simplicity and ease of bootstrapping C on any platform, without any special domain skills, was what made it absolutely killer. The LLVM promise of being easily ported just doesn't hold true. Making an LLVM backend is outrageously complicated in comparison to a rigid, non-optimizing C compiler, and it requires deep knowledge of how LLVM works in the first place.

[aidenn0]

Ada was mandated by the DoD for a bit. My understanding is that, in practice, this involved making a half-hearted effort in Ada, failing and then applying for a variance to not use Ada.

[7thaccount]

Ada is pretty cool, but not sure if any more modern than APL. Both are actively maintained and useful in different areas.

[sevensor]

While we’re at it, modern Fortran exists and has its boosters. https://fortran-lang.org/

[int_19h]

Ada has seen quite a few major features added to it in the past couple of decades.

[wbl]

The one shop that really used it is now open to C++ and I expect Rust. But their projects tend to last a long time: 3 generations have flown in one of them, etc.

[thayne]

Modern fortran is actually fairly modern too. But most fortran codebases aren't modern fortran, they're Fortran 77. If you're lucky.

[atrettel]

I agree that many modern Fortran codes aren't truly "modern" Fortran, but in my experience most codes have at least been ported to Fortran 90, even if they largely keep a lot of Fortran 77 baggage (especially the type system and indentation!). In all of my experience, I've really only encountered a single Fortran code being used currently that is actually Fortran 77 in the flesh. That said, I still think many Fortran codes would benefit from using more modern features, since so many are stuck in the past and are difficult to maintain for that reason.