Who's Using Ada? Real-World Projects Powered by the Ada Programming Language

A lot of radar systems run on Ada. Its takes a little getting used to, but its a good language.<p>Ada has a c binding package so it can call down to the OS libraries (networking, shared memory), which is great, but kills some of the niceness of living in an ada world.<p>When I was trying out GO, I got a little ada flashback for some reason.<p>The package system was good.<p>I disliked ada strings though.<p>When I left the industry, they were looking for alernative languages for new projects. GCC Ada compiler was being considered for maintaining older projects, seemed decent. <a href="http://libre.adacore.com/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;libre.adacore.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;gnat-gpl-edition&#x2F;</a>

Although I&#x27;ve never coded in Ada I have had to read existing code to figure out what it was doing.<p>Ada struck me as a language that would be a pain to write in(at least it would take a long time) but it was a pleasure to read. Even without an intimate knowledge of the language (I was a C++ guy) I was able to figure it out.

Ada is a language that deserves more love.

I would have enjoyed seeing a list like this in university where we had the option to learn Ada for a software engineering course.<p>Ada was mandated to be used for military applications but became largely irrelevant for commercial applications. It&#x27;s now considered a white elephant [1] by many.<p>1: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;White_elephant</a>

Ada was used on some of the modules on India&#x27;s Mars mission: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1ujcmo/we_are_three_isro_scientists_here_to_answer_your/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;india&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1ujcmo&#x2F;we_are_three_i...</a>

The attribute mechanism is something a lot of languages would benefit from. Need to know the maximum value of an integer? Just ask the integer type to tell you. No going to a library to look up inscrutable constants.

This is certainly an impressive list of projects. Ada seems to be favored for critical software that can&#x27;t ever fail. I&#x27;ve been considering how to achieve this type of software reliability for more &quot;enterprisey&quot; applications. Formally verifiable languages are certainly intriguing, but would be a hard sell for the managers at the Fortune 100 company where I work.<p>Reading the wikipedia page for Ada didn&#x27;t really give much insight into why the language is so heavily favored for applications like avionics software. Built in task based concurrency is certainly nice, but not a game-changer. Can someone more familiar with Ada explain what makes it so popular for high reliability applications?<p>Or is it a question of culture and tooling rather than the language itself?

I used Ada on my first coding job - test scripts for Airbus engines back in the mid-90s. Nice to see they&#x27;re still using Ada, though tbh I don&#x27;t remember a single thing about the language except for you can&#x27;t dynamically create objects

Wow, I went to GW and learned Ada in CS051. I didn&#x27;t have much of a point of reference at the time to compare it to other languages, but it was pretty easy to learn and I enjoyed the class.

Nice list. I programmed in Ada for eight months in 1997 when I was on a co-op at Rockwell Collins, working on their simulation testbed for their general aviation flight management systems -- I recognize several of the planes listed in the Commercial Aviation section.<p>I ended up really enjoying programming in Ada and was unhappy about having to return to C++ when I went back to school that fall. It was a bit more work to write, but it was easy to read and when it compiled it usually did what you expected it to. It&#x27;s a language that makes it difficult for you to shoot yourself in the foot.

I&#x27;d love to hear about remote Ada jobs, and not requiring US citizenship...

As a college student, is Ada still worth learning for (Canadian) development jobs in critical systems? I&#x27;d like to think it would give me an edge coming out of school, but I keep reading that new applications are being written in C&#x2F;C++.<p>Edit: In fact, I interned at an avionics company and they&#x27;re slowly trying to entirely switch to model-based development, using certified software that generates the code for you.

Ada is still extremely popular in mission critical software. I know the US military and NASA use it a lot.

We used Ada in my software engineering class in 1992 to <i>try</i> to build a system to do route finding on a map and then generate directions. Each build took 40 to 50 minutes on a pretty nice PC at the time. I don&#x27;t miss those days.

I used Ada during my first internship (avionics software). However, the group I was part of was in the middle of phasing out Ada in favor of C&#x2F;C++. This was around 2010-2012.

Ada was my first language in college. At JC, our professors were DoD contractors at the nearby Air Force Base. Good times.

I worked on two geosynchronous communication satellites built on Ada (late 1980s using the TLD compiler). Both had a maximum of 48KB of ROM and 16KB of RAM. That included attitude control, command, telemetry, thermal&#x2F;power management, fault manager, and little OS.<p>Since then, I&#x27;ve done pretty much nothing but C, but I do miss Ada&#x27;s features from time to time.