In the video, the narrator also claims that Ada compilers were expensive and thus students were dissuaded from trying it out. However, in researching this comment I founds that the Gnat project has been around since the early 90s. Maybe it wasn't complete enough until much later and maybe potential students of the time weren't using GNU?
The GNAT project started in 1992 when the United States Air Force awarded New
York University (NYU) a contract to build a free compiler for Ada to help
with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract
required the use of the GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the
copyright to the Free Software Foundation.
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.
1: If you had to guess, how high is the level of complexity of rustc?
2: How do you think gccrs will fare?
3: Do you like or dislike the Rust specification that originated from Ferrocene?
4: Is it important for a systems language to have more than one full compiler for it?
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].
Edit: Thanks for that video. It is an interesting synthesis ad great context.
Also it enables getting cheaper programmers who where possible might be isolated from the actual TS materiel to develop on the cheap so that the profit margin is bigger.
It gets worse outside of the flight side JSF software - or so it looks like from GAO reports. You don't turn around a culture of shittiness that fast, and I've seen earlier code in the same area (but not for JSF) by L-M... and well, it was among the worst code I've seen. Including failing even basic requirement of running on a specific version of a browser at minimum.