This very question scares the hell out of me. Language just seems so far away from what really matters. The language is a part of this, but assembling the rig

This very question scares the hell out of me. Language just seems so far away from what really matters. The language is a part of this, but assembling the right team with the right mentality is the key. There was the DOD Ada mandate and over the years there were some interesting studies showing reliability differences between Ada and C++, but also in hopes of keeping costs lower, they use C and C++ in a lot of that stuff now so that they can use off the shelf software libraries and such. That says a lot, the ability to hire people and develop with some velocity matters too. Language won't make a shitty architecture good. Language won't make a shitty team good, either. Fundamentally, if you pay attention to where this stuff matters most, Ada has to be a standout choice but those industries don't change, they don't adopt new stuff and the whole process by which that happens in them isn't one that results in the best technology, it's one that results in a consensus technology. The risk of a line of code knocking a plane down or letting the missile hit the wrong target are just fundamentally different than letting someone log in to a web site; maybe they shouldn't be but the very culture difference between those groups is huge and so you can look at them and say "ah, we should use Ada too, 'it's safer'" but that is probably not a great business decision. At least, not right now.