I'm not saying it's justified, but I think the syntax is also a big impediment (just like for my daily driver, OCaml). Ada looks pretty verbose and annoying to write code in, at least if one wants to use it for side projects, small utilities, etc. rather than spaceship firmware; and that's probably how a lot of languages become popular, you need to tinker with them on small things.

OCaml has seen the alternative "Reason" syntax (JS-like) grow in popularity. Maybe a C-like (or better, rust-like) syntax for Ada would help the language's adoption. People already using Ada would complain that the current syntax is fine but they're not the target demographic :-)

My opinion: I really dislike Rust's syntax because to me it is similar to Perl's that I also do not like that much as I do not know what is happening just by looking at it (I still like to use Perl here and there, but these days I lean towards Tcl more), it seems hidden from me, even compared to something as C where I have to think about conversions and whatnot.

I can easily read and understand someone's Ada, C, or OCaml code and actually know what is going on, but I cannot read and understand even my own Perl code (after a week or two), or other people's Rust code. I would rather prefer reference implementations to be in C than in Rust, too. If I read the C version, I can easily port it to any language vs. if it were in Rust.

Thank you for the answer :-). I'm still surprised because to me, Rust looks a _lot_ like OCaml with curly braces. The surface lexical conventions are mixed with C++ (like `::` for namespacing) but code still looks more like OCaml than C, with `let` bindings, sum types, expressions, `match` being omnipresent. Even the type annotations look more ML-ish than the type-first C convention. I fail to see the relation to perl (there's barely any `$` in rust code! and most sigils are still the & related to references that also abound in C).

I compared it to Perl because of its heavy use of symbols in general. In Rust, you can have 6 symbols next to each other and that is valid code. See below.

OCaml does not look like Rust to me (OCaml seems more consistent, and Rust seems like a mixed bag of everything to me). It does not hide as much behind symbols for example as Rust does, I think, and learning it was really easy. I tried to read Rust, I really did, but everything is so hidden from me. I did not mean to say that any of the mentioned languages are anywhere close to C though. In any case, if I had to look at reference implementations, C would be the best (to me). It is really easy to know what is going on and why, and thus it is easy to implement it in any languages I know. Probably because it is not a language with many high-level abstractions or language constructs (syntactic sugars) that hide what is going on.

Example snippets as to why I dislike Rust:

  let mut parents_array = ArrayVec::<[&[u8; BLOCK_LEN]; MAX_SIMD_DEGREE_OR_2]>::new()

  let input_ptrs: &[*const u8; DEGREE] = &*(inputs.as_ptr() as *const [*const u8; DEGREE]);

And this is nothing, there are much worse ones, and I would have to give you files for that, but pretty much any famous Rust project is difficult to read for me. I really do not understand most Rust code, I wonder if the problem is with me.

> Ada looks pretty verbose and annoying to write code in,

I still dont understand this, you spend 80% of the time thinking about code, 19% reading, and 1% typing.

I don't have this experience. I like to prototype by writing code (or type signatures), and then refactor a lot from the initial solution. That's easier to do if the syntax is reasonably concise (the other half is to have good types which Ada definitely provides).

80% thinking when you're stuck and don't know who to ask. I've made the same mistake. Have you watched some streamers? They are prototyping by typing, I would say, 50% of the time.

I never used Ada, but read a book on it.

I don't even remember much, just that how much I loved just the look of the example programs, but that was during community college when I was new to programming. It wasn't part of a class, but the guy who implemented the curriculum just jammed the library with jewels and the entire library collection was just full of classics especially since the actual curriculum was just a basic associates in "business data processing."