>According to Brian Pflug, engineering avionics software manager at Boeing's Commercial Airplane Group, most companies disliked the idea of a standard language at all, and then seriously objected to Ada as too immature.
By what measure did they consider Ada "too immature" I wonder? It's one of the oldest languages, an open international standard, and has been through several major updates over three decades. On the surface there are few if any languages that claim more maturity than that.
There's no compiler (and standard library implementation) that has faced public scrutiny like other popular languages have. Aditionally, there are no IDEs for Ada comparable to the IDEs of other comercial languages (e.g. C++, C# or Java). Which is understandable given how little interest there is in Ada, amongst the "general public" of developers, which is understandable given how there's no proper free implementation of for Ada.
There's essentially just the AdaCore implementation that costs $$$, the GPL'd AdaCore implementation that requires you to publish your source code (because of the libraries) and then there's some unsupported GCC implementation.
I like Ada, and I would like to see it gain more market share. If it had, things like Rust and Go may have been superfluous. But the way things are, I just don't see it happening. Unless you're some big enterprise Ada is essentially a non-option, due to licensing, and if you're a big enterprise it's essentially a non-option since there's very few devs around for it. And so it remains an obscure language used in very niche applications (albeit with great success there?).
Really strange about the tooling, if I were BAE or Boeing I'd be standing up a project to create an IDE on top of Eclipse - ~2 man year effort for vast productivity gains!
dons asbestos pants in expectation of anti eclipse comments!
By what measure did they consider Ada "too immature" I wonder? It's one of the oldest languages, an open international standard, and has been through several major updates over three decades. On the surface there are few if any languages that claim more maturity than that.