Back in university I took a course in legacy programming. We did a project in each of Fortran, COBOL and Ada. I enjoyed Ada very much. The module system made a lot of sense to me and the compiler found a lot of mistakes (compared to C). Thanks for sharing this article. It brought me back and makes me want to give Ada another go now that I have 10 years of real world experience.
I had a digital design course. The instructor hated verilog and preferred VHDL for reason that didn't make much sense to me those days. There was only one VHDL compiler available that time called ghdl which worked fine for course. There was modelsim as well but one had to go to the lab.
Later I learnt that VHDL is related to ADA. I've been itching to try it for a long while. Might give it a try this week. Currently I am in my Rust phase and loving it (thanks cargo). My Haskell fever is gone though.
I haven't tried Ada yet, but do have experience with VHDL. It's the most modular language I've encountered. It's easy to work with big teams in VHDL. Choose everyone's responsibility, design the interfaces (entities) and have a brief discussion on it. Then go separate ways and implement your parts (architecture). They all finally fit together like magic without needing too much coordination or interaction between the team members. I'm pretty sure that's what's great about Ada too. However, I still don't understand what it is about the language's design that makes this possible.
One place where you can easily use ADA syntax is any database that implements ANSI SQL/PSM, and there are many.
"SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language."
