Ada has a pretty impressive record in safety critical systems; something that cannot be said of C. Aircraft software systems and many air traffic control systems in particular are all written in Ada.
And yet, somehow, I've never seen a single line of live ADA code...and there are literally hundreds of millions of lines of C code doing work right now. Not only that, someone is almost certainly starting a new program written in C right now...and now...and now...and now. And...you, guessed it, now.
I'm sure Ada had a useful life, possibly even in a niche where C would never be an effective tool. I was just saying that design-by-committee, even with a lot of user input, is probably not the right way to build a timeless programming language, and that building a language while using the language probably is.
Ada never caught on as a general purpose programming language, but a subset of it lives on in PL/SQL, the embedded language in Oracle. It's not the most flexible or elegant language, but it's easy enough to learn and extremely reliable. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. Sure you can run C in-process with your database, but unless you really, really have to it's a bit pointless to risk i.
