In the May 2005 issue of Dr Dobbs magazine, the "embedded space"
column by Ed Nisley has a brutal dismissal of Ada:

    the entire cadre of Ada programmers is reaching retirement age
    with no replacements on tap.

You can access the article at
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9698/ddj0505p/0505p.html - you'll have
to pay and/or register if you are not a subscriber.

I sent this letter to the editor:

    In "Reliability: The Hard and the Soft", in the May 2005 issue, Ed
    Nisley dismisses Ada for DO-178B applications, saying "the entire
    cadre of Ada programmers is reaching retirement age with no
    replacements on tap". I'm surprised that Ed is propagating this
    myth.

    For one example, I'm not "nearing retirement age", and I've got
    two young engineers on my team, happily learning Ada and hard
    real-time programming. The AdaCore Academic Initiative
    (http://www.adacore.com/academic_members.php) has over 70 member
    universities, all training new Ada programmers. The Ada 2006
    standard will be released next year, adding Java-style interfaces
    to the language, along with other significant improvements. Many
    Ada vendors are making money and growing; see
    http://www.adaic.com/index.html for current information on the
    state of the Ada industry.

    The SPARK (http://www.praxis-his.com/sparkada/) subset of Ada is
    directly targeted to high-integrity systems, and is growing in
    popularity; several tool vendors are incorporating it (for
    example, ILogix - see
    http://www.ilogix.com/newsroom/newsroom_detail.cfm?pressrelease=2004_09_29_035924_126720pr.cfm).

    Dr Dobbs has always been good at helping programmers learn which
    tools are appropriate for their job. Ada is clearly a good tool
    for DO-178B applications, as well as many other applications. To
    dismiss Ada in this way is a disservice to your readers, and
    ultimately to the people who will be using the systems built by
    your readers.


It would help if other Dr Dobbs subscribers wrote in as well.

-- 
-- Stephe