It is funny, from what I understand one of the old complaints about Ada was how verbose it was in comparison to C at the time.
Comparing modern Ada to modern C++, C++ has tried its best to equal Ada in verbosity, although C++11 fixed a good deal of C++03's excesses.
From what I can tell, Ada is still missing a good way to do really primitive bit operations in a simple matter. Then again, bit ops destroy Ada's type safety, so I can see why they were made difficult. Still, if one needs to start poking around the individual bits of arbitrary data, C makes that easy-ish. (I mean it could be a lot better, it isn't hard to come up with a better syntax than C's for bit-wise access)
But everything I have read about the latest Ada spec makes it seem like a nice language.
I also believe another problem is that Ada has always been a rather academic language in many ways. Where as for the longest time no one in the C community really talked about pointer aliasing (and I'm guessing if you took a random cross sample of programmers in the late 80s/90s, many of them wouldn't know what the term even meant), Ada requires you know about pointer aliasing just to use pointers at all!
Then there is the fact that the language syntax is defined in BNF, and the main reference pointed to for Ada is the official reference manual. On one hand, hey awesome, the language spec is freely available for all! On the other hand, it is about as readable as any other official spec. The experts who can easily understand the spec end up just pointing to it (after all it is so easy for them to read) and thus simplified explanations don't get created.
> In fact most of the people who complain about C++ would never even consider Ada.
If I had tooling and other people in my group had more familiarity with it, I sure as heck would. Holy crap am I sick and tired of being limited to just straight C and a very tiny subset of C++. And 90% of the new stuff in C++ is not targeted at the embedded market (quite the opposite!) where as Ada has stayed closer to its roots.
Comparing modern Ada to modern C++, C++ has tried its best to equal Ada in verbosity, although C++11 fixed a good deal of C++03's excesses.
From what I can tell, Ada is still missing a good way to do really primitive bit operations in a simple matter. Then again, bit ops destroy Ada's type safety, so I can see why they were made difficult. Still, if one needs to start poking around the individual bits of arbitrary data, C makes that easy-ish. (I mean it could be a lot better, it isn't hard to come up with a better syntax than C's for bit-wise access)
But everything I have read about the latest Ada spec makes it seem like a nice language.
I also believe another problem is that Ada has always been a rather academic language in many ways. Where as for the longest time no one in the C community really talked about pointer aliasing (and I'm guessing if you took a random cross sample of programmers in the late 80s/90s, many of them wouldn't know what the term even meant), Ada requires you know about pointer aliasing just to use pointers at all!
Then there is the fact that the language syntax is defined in BNF, and the main reference pointed to for Ada is the official reference manual. On one hand, hey awesome, the language spec is freely available for all! On the other hand, it is about as readable as any other official spec. The experts who can easily understand the spec end up just pointing to it (after all it is so easy for them to read) and thus simplified explanations don't get created.
> In fact most of the people who complain about C++ would never even consider Ada.
If I had tooling and other people in my group had more familiarity with it, I sure as heck would. Holy crap am I sick and tired of being limited to just straight C and a very tiny subset of C++. And 90% of the new stuff in C++ is not targeted at the embedded market (quite the opposite!) where as Ada has stayed closer to its roots.