Context is important here. Note that the article is on a hardware design website. The software development they are talking about is embedded software. In th

Context is important here. Note that the article is on a hardware design website. The software development they are talking about is embedded software. In the goverment contracting world in the 90s ADA was very common. The DoD mandated ADA in some development contracts. So, I can see how someone from this world might make the mistake of calling ADA mainstream. In this domain a clear view of the hardware is important for maintenance. The hardware/software interface is where a lot of troubles may be found. Finding a problem with this interface through a VM takes longer to troubleshoot. Back to language selection in this industrial segment. There were contract requirements imposing a particular language. Also upper managment might impose a language choice. Allowing the actual software engineers to select the programming language is a recent and not yet widespread change. How I read the sentence about selecting a language is to say the engineers doing the works should do so since they know best what the needs are.