Ada

In the early 1980s, the United States Department of Defense recognized the need to address the language requirements of large scale mission critical programming projects. In order to do so, they sponsored a contest to see who could develop the best new programming language. The winning team was made up of several companies led by Honeywell-Bull with Jean Ichbiah as the chief architect. The resulting language, named Ada, is a very complete high-level language and incorporates almost every programming construct known at the time of its design. Unfortunately, compiler technology in 1983 was not well suited to the completeness of Ada's design which, in part, led to Ada's reputation as a complex language. While Ada is more complex than Java, it is actually far less complex than C++. Today, compiler technology has caught up with Ada's design and there are many excellent compilers available. In 1995, Ada became the first object-oriented language to become an international standard. While Ada has seen widespread use on military software projects, its use in commercial applications has been more limited. Surprisingly, given its Department of Defense heritage, Ada has seen perhaps more commercial use in Europe and elsewhere overseas.