I started reading about Ada back when it was still called "Green". One of my co-workers was one of the (very large) group of people invited to evaluate the cand

I started reading about Ada back when it was still called "Green". One of my co-workers was one of the (very large) group of people invited to evaluate the candidate languages, and he let me read the draft proposal for the Green language. I learned Ada and used it in several projects throughout my career. It was one of those "good ideas" the Defense Department came up with that didn't quite work out. At the time the programming language that became Ada was proposed, the Defense Department had somewhere around 700 programming languages being used in various projects. A project looking to add staff had very little chance of finding someone who knew the language being used. They had to hire an experienced programmer and expect that he would be able to get up to speed on the language being used in time to meet the (often unreasonable) deadlines. Ada was intended to replace many or most of those 700 programming languages. It sort of worked for a while. A lot of smart people worked on developing the language, and it was used in a lot of projects. The problem was that it never got wide adoption outside of defense contractor companies and aviation companies, and sometime back the Defense Department dropped the mandate that all new projects had to use Ada. Ada is still being used in some fields, especially in some Defense Department projects, avionics and air traffic control, but it isn't in the TIOBE top 20 list of programming languages. Unless you're planning on making a career of working on defense projects, Ada probably isn't a language you should think about learning.