alt Hacker NewsThe DOD could easily have organized Ada hackathons with a lot of prize money to "make Ada cool" if they had chosen to in order to get the language out of the limelight. They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.
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> They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.
If the actual purpose of the Ada mandate was cartel-making for companies selling Ada products, that would have been counter-productive to their goals.
Not that compiler vendors making money is a bad thing, compiler development needs to be funded somehow. Funding for language development is also a topic. There was a presentation by the maker of Elm about how programming language development is funded [0].
GNAT exists because DoD funded a free, open source toolchain.
Ada would never have been cool.
Ironically I remember one of the complaints was it took a long time for the compilers to stabilize. They were such complex beasts with a small userbase so you had smallish companies trying to develop a tremendously complex compiler for a small crowd of government contractors, a perfect recipe for expensive software.
I think maybe they were just a little ahead of their time on getting a good open source compiler. The Rust project shows that it is possible now, but back in the 80s and 90s with only the very early forms of the Internet I don't think the world was ready.