I've read about a really beautiful langauge called "Ada", which seems very powerful to me, with a lot of what we call these days "safety features".
What was wrong with Ada not to make it a first-class language in industry?
I know that it has been used in mission-critical software. What I am asking about is what does not make it a good language for a wider domain. For example, C was created to be a systems language but it has an important role in the scientific world.
Ada has 'made it' for what it was intended to be used for. Mainly mission critical software ... e.g: 90% of the F22 raptor's fly by wire control is written in Ada (the standard DOD programming language).
In a way it has succeeded, because it has influenced other languages still in widespread use today (especially via exception handling).
It may have been overspecified, having been designed for US defense use, by a committee. It was probably ahead of its time in some respects (with the safety features) but soon became behind the times in others (not object-oriented).
In comparison, C was so low-level that it was able to replace assembly-language coding, and so simply defined that it was easy to implement a compiler, and had the "killer app" of being the foundation of Unix. This gave it momentum for widespread adoption, and meant that C++ had a ready audience for an upgrade that included some more modern features bolted onto C. That joint C/C++ dominance has meant that subsequent widely adopted languages have usually mimicked C syntax (especially Java, ECMAScript and C#).
It was and is a first class language in the industries that would benefit from "safety features". It is one the most widely used languages used in Defense and mission critical systems for exactly that reason. Especially when you know that it was originally developed for the US DoD, I think it has been very successful in it's intended field.
Regarding Ada not being OO as some answers imply, this is no longer true in Ada 95.
As someone who started of as an Ada developer, I'd have to say that the only thing that was wrong with it was timing and inertia. I still maintain that its the most elegant language I've worked with. Unfortunately there weren't many good or high profile compilers for PCs so Ada development was (from my experience) carried out on expensive Sun workstations. This doesn't lend itself to hobbyist developers and the c developers were just happy to keep working away with what they knew.
Java took a lot of good ideas from Ada and then migrated them to c style syntax so that they could attract people that wanted the benefits of managed code but didn't want to learn a new Syntax.
Perhaps if Microsoft had had the vision we'd have Ada .NET instead of C# and we'd have a modern language, with a great syntax and a large business market. That could have been my development nirvana.
When I was at uni I learnt Java and Ada. With Java you had a lot of IDEs to choose from, a whole range of books, a load of libraries and a load of frameworks.
With Ada we only seemed to have access to poor IDEs, a few books and very few frameworks, I think because of these reasons Ada didn't reach a critical mass to make it mainstream, and remains stuck in the misson critical application development sector.
I still think the coolest thing about Ada was allowing users to declare their own primitive data types (sample from Wikipedia):
type Month_Type is range 1 .. 12;
I totally agree with Rick J. Languages are designed to match specific needs. Ada because of its very strong typing (exhausting i must say), has been design for application safety and reliability.
And it has been a total success since Ada is embedded in A LOT of flight software. It's integrated in the european ARIANE rocket. It was integrated in the first ARIANE 5 launch, which ended-up tragically:
"64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed integer value caused a hardware exception (more specifically, an arithmetic overflow, as the floating point number had a value too large to be represented by a 16-bit signed integer)"
However, Ada is not to blame (I am to blame these nasty insinuations :)) . The conception and integration of an older ARIANE 4 flight software caused the disaster: the Inertial Reference System.
The Inertial Reference System (SRI 2) in charge of detecting the rocket stability, gave wrong informations to the On-Board Computer. The OBC then tried to adjust the rocket verticality by adding more power to the side of the rocket. As a result, the rocket took an angle of attack of more than 20 degrees, such angle automatically caused the engine self-destruction.
In fact, because of the exception, the SRI 2 showed diagnostic data which was misinterpreted as filght data by the OBC. The OBC tried to switch to the backup SRI (SRI 1), but this one crashed at the same moment, for the same reasons...
http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html
Edited. Thanks to comments.
Ada is a good language, but like COBOL it's never been popular with the larger public. Basic, C and Pascal used to be way more popular amongst people who wanted to learn to program. As a result, Ada compilers used to be more expensive than C, Basic or Pascal compilers, simply because less hobby-programmers would invest in this language. Actually, FORTRAN would have been less popular if it wasn't for the free FORTRAN compiler that's part of the GNU GCC compiler family. GNU even keeps Ada a bit more popular by also providing an Ada compiler. Still, these languages are less popular amongst developers than C#, C++, Pascal, Java and the many scripting languages.
There's nothing inherent in the language that makes it inferior to your comparison language, C. The main problem is that C reached a practically unheard of critical mass. C was already the hobbyist and systems programming language when Ada came out. By the time a sizable percentage of C users became convinced it had weaknesses, they just went out and created C++ rather than switch to Ada. The upcomming version of C++ has all kinds of goodies cribbed from Ada (eg: strongly-typed enums, proper counted loops).
There is still tons of code out there running (and being written in) Ada. It has been quite a success by its own standards. It just didn't take over the world.
C (and its sequel C++) is sort of like the World of Warcraft of computer languages. It just happened to capture lightning in a bottle. There's still lots of room for innovation in new programming languages, but if your standard of success is to become as big as C, you might as well just take all of your money to Vegas. Your odds of hitting it big are about the same.
There's an old saying in golf: If you get your tee shot close to the hole, it's skill. If you hit it in, it's luck.
It was used on Government Projects, and Ada Vendors charged that way
For example, when we bought Sparcworks C/C++ for the Sun, the list price was $2,000/seat. For Sparcworks Ada (which as far as I could tell was identical in features) the list price was $10,000/seat.
This dampened a lot of (non-vendor) commercial enthusiasm, coz nobody wants to be stuck with toolsets priced for the government!
Although Ada 83 was not Object Oriented, it was Object-based. So it did have support for a subset of OO features including encapsulation.
Personally, I think the language is reasonable and met many of its objectives, but it failed to reach broad adoption for "marketing" reasons.
One contributing factor might have been that the name "Ada" was trademarked early on and compiler vendors were required to pass a bunch of tests before they could legally use the name.
I think could have discouraged people from tinkering with it and creating compilers. Without easy access to compilers, it didn't take off.
Interestingly, Oracle PL/SQL is based on Ada, so depending on how loose your Ada defintion is, it's one of the most popular database languages in use today!
PL/SQL is based on the programming language Ada. As a result, PL/SQL uses a variant of Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada (DIANA), a tree-structured intermediate language.
-- PL/SQL User's Guide and Reference