Ada was relatively easy to learn by anyone in the past with Object Pascal or Modula-2/3 knowledge.
Which used to be quite common before C and C++ got widespread during the mid-90's.
Ada's biggest problem was the price of the compilers, and lack of adoption by OS SDKs, an issue that also pushed other languages outside of mainstream.
Businesses already had to pay for the OS developer tools, unless there were legal requirements on their domain, they weren't keen in buying extra compilers.
I can confirm teaching basic Ada to newbies to "go and correct logic bug X" is 2-3 weeks on-the-job training. We don't even go for Ada experience when hiring anymore, just programming experience, and low cowboy factor...
That Unix is the roadster that gave us c. But Linux was the one that drove c into our core operating system infrastructure. Windows did the same favor for c++.
One of the reasons why other languages failed? While c/c++ flourished in the oss environment, even with its tooling being sub-par at the time. imo.
I almost agree, just not quite regarding how it went.
C++ was already being adopted by all desktop systems, Mac, OS/2, Windows, even if at lower level it was a mix of Pascal (Mac) and C.
On proprietary UNIX systems, C++ major stronghold was CORBA based applications, while some companies were pushing C++ bindings for Motif.
Then GNU and Linux happened, with FSF suggesting that the best approach to write portable open source should be C, and then we arrived in the present situation.
There are more computers on this planet than just plain desktop.
Most of them are servers, mainframes and embedded devices running some form of UNIX based OS.
If you prefer I can rename it to nix, as I wasn't thinking about POSIX certification.
BSD, Minix (running on your Intel chip), Aix, HP-UX, POSIX layers in IBM and Unisys mainframes, RTOS, NuttX, QNX, and many other POSIX based OSes for embedded deployment.
Which used to be quite common before C and C++ got widespread during the mid-90's.
Ada's biggest problem was the price of the compilers, and lack of adoption by OS SDKs, an issue that also pushed other languages outside of mainstream.
Businesses already had to pay for the OS developer tools, unless there were legal requirements on their domain, they weren't keen in buying extra compilers.