I first learned Ada in a university programming languages class in 1984. It was chosen by our professor as the culmination of classic programming language ideas

I first learned Ada in a university programming languages class in 1984. It was chosen by our professor as the culmination of classic programming language ideas. We did not have access to a full Ada compiler, but we used "Janus Ada", which implemented a subset. I really liked it because it was very consistent and readable and you could create sophisticated data types, and the compiler strictly enforced their use. A few years later (1988), I was working an a large military aircraft project that used Ada. We did a huge up front design with reams of design documentation. The first code that was written was a package of data types to ensure consistency. Unfortunately, there was very little Ada experience among the team and we sometimes designed ourselves into corners. Such problems were often solved by using "unchecked conversions" to get around the type enforcement, which defeated the purpose. The problems we had were similar to problems huge C++ projects would have a few years later. The other problem we had was with the compiler. The government had placed high performance demands on the compiler, so it was highly optimized. Unfortunately, it would sometimes optimize away code that you needed. Fortunately, we could generate a code listing that interspersed the assembly output of the compiler with the corresponding Ada source code and thus find the problem. Usually adding an intermediate local variable to break up a complex calculation solved the problem. In 1990, I got hired by a start up that was doing military contract work simulating radars for flight simulators. They had done all of their work in C, but now they had a contract that required Ada, so I became their "Ada expert." All of the C guys hated Ada because of its strictness. Ada wouldn't let you mix numeric data types without an explicit conversion, and that really chafed the C folks. It reminds me of today's dynamic/static typing debate. The Navy ended up canceling the aircraft so they no longer needed our radar simulator. The next project I was on decided to use the new C++ language everyone was excited about. Ada was starting to fall out of favor, so waivers for the Ada mandate were getting easy to obtain. At they time, I was thrilled to use C++. It seemed edgy compared to the bureaucratic nature of Ada. Now, however, I don't know if C++ was an improvement overall. It has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. I'm happy to see that the Rust guys are trying to learn from Ada. I was an inexperienced kid when I used Ada, so I am by no means an expert, but from what I do know, I think it still has something to teach us.