people "avoided" it because up until fairly recently in its history, the only available compilers were priced to sell to the US Department of Defense and the language was too complex for other people to bother implementing a standards compliant compiler. it's an absurd language with a few good ideas buried underneath a mountain of engineering cruft. it's a fantastic reflection of the environment it was born out of.
That's a fair point. However until relatively recently in the history of programming language in general that was true. All of them.
There has been a decent C compiler for the last ⅔ of my career, roughly. Other languages followed; I remember early in my working life when Zortech announced the first ever native-code C++ compiler, and it was commercial. As was Pascal etc.
The mailing list I've been on for the longest time in my life is the British APL society (some 38 years now), and for much of the first 2 decades I was on that, one of their main goals was a decent free or cheap APL interpreter. Then suddenly there were free compilers and interpreters everywhere from the mid-1990s onwards.
About the time ordinary consumer Windows got useful, suddenly, so did Linux, and then suddently decent free compilers were everywhere. And about 5Y later, Mac OS X happened.
Then about 5Y after Mac OS X first appeared, meaning OS X Server with the Platinum appearance, suddenly Linux started to catch up in earnest... meaning that soon after MS forced Corel to kill Corel LinuxOS and WordPerfect Office for Linux, and Caldera went insane, Bruce Perens proposed UserLinux...
And within a year or two, Ubuntu appeared, and Fedora started playing catch-up, as it still is.
And after a couple of years, Ubuntu got pretty good, and frankly, for all its foibles, it's still the best freebie for non-techies. Or Ubuntu derivatives, such as Mint, Zinc, Zorin, or Linux Lite ( which isn't light at all, but is all right otherwise.)
Of course you make a good point yourself, compilers generally weren't free (as in beer) back then. What makes Ada stand out is that it was quite a bit pricier. The "small developer" license of AdaCore for example is $25k/year and it covers 5 seats. Hobbyists aren't going to pay that. It was 3 years after Zortech's compiler that Borland came out with their own C++ priced at $100 and was more than good enough (I don't know Zortech's pricing model to compare.) The only free Ada compiler I know of is GNAT and it's rife with issues (extremely massive binary size, even with the runtime disabled)
Honestly the tooling just isn't great for the language. It's a real shame, because the subtyping system and design-through-contracts are way ahead of their time. ATS is the only other language I can think of that offers such robust safety features while also targeting the same performance as a systems lang.
