I point to articles like this when I hear Rust enthusiasts speculate at how long it will take companies to see the light and move from C, C++, or Java to Rust, or even how long it will take before Rust overtakes these languages as the programming language of choice.
After all, Ada had the DoD mandate (routinely waived, but still) and a substantial amount of academic and industry backing, at least for a while. And now? most Rust enthusiasts don’t even know what I’m talking about.
…and Ada is relatively simple by comparison to Rust.
People only pretend to care about costs and whatnot when they believe it to benefit themselves. They’ll always move the goalposts.
I’ll use the OpenBSD developers as an example: They claim to want security, while using the language least suited to that; when this is pointed out, they in-turn point to the large amount of existing code; and when that fails to sway people, they move on to even more arbitrary requirements, such as compiler support in their base of software. Even if Ada were to surmount each of these requirements, they’d simply add new ones, like language familiarity with their team.
This example shows that people will only pretend to use reason for what they want to do, and will abandon it when inconvenient.
One of my favorite quotes from this: “Bug rates in C++ are running higher even than C”.