[notalaser]

Do you think (as in bet-your-company's-profits-on-it believe) that Ada will still be a first-class language in GCC ten years from now (the standard product lifecycle for RHEL), and that you'll be able to staff the project and build a community throughout that period?

[lmm]

If I had to choose between betting my company's profits on Ada or C, I'd choose Ada (though I think there are better choices today). Limited tools and a need to train developers are easier to deal with than random crashes and security vulnerabilities.

[notalaser]

But it's not "just" limited tools and a need to train developers. A language having a small community results in a lack of library and collaboration; you end up dealing with tool vendors who barely manage to keep themselves afloat, let alone invest in development, with long unmaintained libraries, with months, sometimes years passing between when a new architecture or OS is available and when the compiler and the libraries you use get updated.

It's not too different from how things are in Common Lisp land, a language (and a land...) that I'm pretty familiar with. It's a great, probably the best language. There are a few success stories, but truth is, in 2017, most large-scale, non-hobby projects are failures.