The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]

https://web.archive.org/web/20111219004314/http://journal.th... (referenced, at least tangentially, in the video) is a piece from the engineering lead which does a great job discussing Why C++. The short summary is "they couldn't find enough people to write Ada, and even if they could, they also couldn't find enough Ada middleware and toolchain."

I actually think Ada would be an easier sell today than it was back then. It seems to me that the software field overall has become more open to a wider variety of languages and concepts, and knowing Ada wouldn't be perceived as widely as career pidgeonholing today. Plus, Ada is having a bit of a resurgence with stuff like NVidia picking SPARK.

Given that there are still 7 vendors selling Ada compilers I always found that argument a bit disingenuous.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/solutions/products/ddci-developer-suite...

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

What is true, is that those vendors, and many others, like UNIX vendors that used to have Ada compilers like Sun, paying for Ada compilers was extra, while C and C++ were already there on the UNIX developers SKU (a tradition that Sun started, having various UNIX SKUs).

So schools and many folks found easier to just buy a C or C++ compiler, than an Ada one, with its price tags.

Something that has helped Ada is the great work done by Ada Core, even if a few love hating them. They are the major sponsor for ISO work, and spreading Ada knowledge on the open source community.

Another factor for Ada not being more popular is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]

> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]

People love to point that out, missing the amount of failures in C derived languages.