I live near Sydney University ( not my alma-mater ). In a rather serendipitous turn, one day on my way home from the shops I was walking past one of the USYD bu

I live near Sydney University ( not my alma-mater ). In a rather serendipitous turn, one day on my way home from the shops I was walking past one of the USYD buildings and there was a giant stack of library books that had thrown out onto the sidewalk as rubbish to be collected by the council. It turns out they were old science faculty books that were no longer prescribed material. I started looking through them and found several books on Safety-critical software development in Ada, several books on hardware design and several others on software development. I took them all home, at first thinking the Ada ones would just be some archaic novelty. When I got a chance to read them I was amazed. I was expecting something akin to COBOL from the language. Instead I found a language that was extremely well designed for its domain. I'd already done a bit of embedded and operating system development, and I could immediately see how Ada would benefit a developer in these areas. Even representation clauses alone are such a huge convenience for low-level programming. I haven't looked back since. I was actually in the process of preparing a bare-bones example of operating system development in Ada, if this post had been three days later I'd have been able to link the finished product here right now.