Ada as a forecast

When one looks back on the history of languages, the question of Ada arises.

Ada was (is?) a language developed in the late 1970s and adopted by the US Department of Defense as its standard language. Yet Ada was not adopted by commercial interests (outside of those connected with the US Department of Defense) and it has been mostly ignored by "mainstream" and hacker communities.

There are a few reasons.

Ada was a large and complex language. Strongly typed and object-oriented, Ada was in the minds of most hobbyists , a "better PL/1". Unfortunately for Ada (and the DoD), no one wanted a better PL/1. (Or even the original PL/1, for that matter.)

Perhaps the biggest factor in Ada's failure to launch was the lack of support from Microsoft and Borland. Both vendors offered C, C++, and their private languages of Visual Basic and Delphi. Neither offered an Ada compiler or development environment.

I dislike giving vendors (especially Microsoft) that much power to shape the market, yet the results are clear: Ada was a still-born language for microcomputer users, and we adopted BASIC, C, and Pascal (later C++ and Visual Basic) for our projects.

If the "vendor effect" is real, then I espect the next decade to be shaped by the languages that are currently supported by the major vendors. For Microsoft, that is C#; for Apple, Objective-C; for Google, Java and Python; for Linux, C++, Perl Python and Ruby. Other languages (LISP, Scheme, Haskell, Erlang, and F#) will have a difficult time.

My preference is an environment with a number of languages, more than just the "one for Microsoft, one for Apple, one for Google, and one for Linux" mode, yet I am afraid that the "one language for your platform" is what we will get.

And Ada will not be among any of them.