Ada, Past Present and Future

Heres a lecture at MIT about Ada from a favorite programmer of mine. [VIDEO] I do not understand the Medium authors definition of "success". I get similarly confused when web commentators use the term "won" (e.g., language X "won") when discussing programming languages. Won what? IMO, the presenter (RIP) was quite successful. Im sure Ada "won" many contracts.

I believe it was Dr Robert Dewar of AdaCore fame who I first heard remark that ( paraphrased ) every time a bug gets missed at a stage of development ( compile-time to alpha, to beta, to production, etc ) the cost of it's resolution increases by an order of magnitude. I'm certainly by no means dismissing the value of concise languages for expressing ideas fluently, but brevity and expressiveness are only two factors influencing the value of a programming language in a specific domain. It's definitely an interesting paper, every time I see it I can't help but think that it's a little disingenuous to conduct an apples to oranges comparison of languages on these particular merits. It's much more difficult to weigh up the relative investment of time necessary to write code that is equally robust, maintainable and fit for purpose. Here's the video I got the Dr Dewar quote from: [VIDEO]

I like this part about the Ada hype: [VIDEO] Compare it to the hype around a current (intentionally corroded) language /s