Albeit PL/SQL is a subset that gives you only a flavor of Ada. I think Ada just plain did not gain momentum at a time when developers looked for a new paradigm

Albeit PL/SQL is a subset that gives you only a flavor of Ada. I think Ada just plain did not gain momentum at a time when developers looked for a new paradigm to aid in building larger, more complex systems. The nod went to OO and C++ was the lucky recipient of attention because of its relationship with C. Now that OO, as implemented by C++ and Java, have not proven to be the Holy Grail, developers are looking for another paradigm. It appears to be a dog fight now between dynamic and functional languages for the nod. Not to stray too far off topic, but Lisp seems to have not gained momentum for almost the polar opposite reason as Ada. Ada's OO stuff was a little late to the table when OO got the nod; Lisp was too far ahead of everything - programmers were too used to the machine level interaction and were not ready for high level abstractions. (Mind you I am coming at Lisp as a newbie who looks at what it offered for decades and shake my head that we passed it up.) Languages often do not get a second chance but Haskell and Lisp, as implemented by Clojure (or Arc), may actually become mainstream. Ada falls into the same category, for me, as Eiffel. I know intuitively that they could reduce some common errors but they're just not interesting.