The Ada partisans are all out in force here in this thread to defend Ada, all four of us. haha...
For what it's worth, niche as Ada may be, it's an _important_ niche. It remains widespread in safety-critical applications, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's really good to see Rust taking lessons from Ada/SPARK in the area of formal proofing! If any language is going to threaten C++, it looks like Rust. I don't expect an Ada resurgence to happen, unfortunately.
> I cannot imagine a serious programmer switching from C++ to Go. If you can, you have a much livelier imaginary life than I do.
A large majority of Ada partisans found their corner in Java, C# and C++'s type system improvements over C, and made the best we could from the sour grapes of C's copy-paste compatibility.
Calling myself an Ada partisan is a bit of a stretch. I've recently begun using it for embedded development, which is a domain almost completely dominated by C. That's the angle I'm coming in from.
For me, coming from Turbo Pascal 3 - 6, it allowed me in 1993 to use a language with a similar level of safety and language features, instead of having to deal with PDP-11 constraints.
I was always the weird kid that asked the professors if I could deliver C projects written in C++ instead, which thankfully some of them did accept.
Specially given that at my degree, C was already out of fashion by the early 90's. First year students got to learn Pascal and C++, and were expected to learn C from their introduction to C++ programming.
> I cannot imagine a serious programmer switching from C++ to Go. If you can, you have a much livelier imaginary life than I do.
This got a laugh out of me.