What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(07-07-2015 03:35 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  

(07-07-2015 02:26 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  ADA - Another one that I played with a little using AGUSTA which was a subset of ADA. AGUSTA is interesting in that it is written in Turbo Pascal, so you can play around with the Compiler and Interpreter. Has anyone here had experience with ADA?

Ada was chosen by IBM in 1988 as the programming language to be used in their development of a new air traffic control system in the US. At that time, many people believed Ada would become the new "standard" programming language, at least for US defense work. It never happened. It was a nightmare. I can't recall all of the specific things that went wrong with the project, but the FAA poured billions of dollars into it and in the end had nothing to show for it. I suspect changing requirements were more at fault than Ada, but the project was ultimately cancelled.

At that time it was likely that IBM did not have a choice as the US government was specifying it for most contracts. My one experience with Ada was installing and testing an Ada compiler on a Unix workstation, I had to increase the ulimit for the user to be able to compile and run the "hello world" program.