>the mandate ended, and Ada faded from the spotlight

Exactly. People stopped using Ada as soon as they were no longer forced to use it.

In other words on its own merits people don't choose it.

On their own merits, people choose SMS-based 2FA, "2FA" which lets you into an account without a password, perf-critical CLI tools written in Python, externalizing the cost of hacks to random people who aren't even your own customers, eating an extra 100 calories per day, and a whole host of other problematic behaviors.

Maybe Ada's bad, but programmer preference isn't a strong enough argument. It's just as likely that newer software is buggier and more unsafe or that this otherwise isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

	▲	stackghost 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I made no judgement about whether Ada is subjectively "bad" or not. I used it for a single side project many years ago, and didn't like it. But my anecdotal experience aside, it is plain to see that developers had the opportunity to continue with Ada and largely did not once they were no longer required to use it. So, it is exceedingly unlikely that some conspiracy against C++, motivated by mustache-twirling Ada gurus, is afoot. And even if that were true, knocking C++ down several pegs will not make people go back to Ada. C#, Rust, and Go all exist and are all immensely more popular than Ada. If there were to be a sudden exodus of C++ developers, these languages would likely be the main beneficiaries. My original point, that C++ isn't what's standing in the way of Ada being popular, still stands.