Is the Ada programming language still relevant in the military?

Question

I know a lot of programming languages now. Back when I was 18 I almost joined the US Air Force and there was a test on Ada. That was over a decade ago. Is the Ada programming language still relevant in the military as it once was?

I'm wondering if new military software projects are still programmed using Ada as their go to language.

Answer 1

In November 2016 the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the report NIST-IR-8151 "Dramatically Reducing Software Vulnerabilities". The report is available at https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8151. The following is an excerpt from that report:

Two presentations at the Software Measures and Metrics to Reduce Security Vulnerabilities (SwMM-RSV) workshop, Andrew Walenstein’s “Measuring Software Analyzability” and James Kupsch’s “Dealing with Code that is Opaque to Static Analysis,” point the direction to new software measures. Both stressed that code should be amenable to automatic analysis. Both presented approaches to define what it means that code is readily analyzed, why analyzability contributes to reduced vulnerabilities and how analyzability could be measured and increased.

There are subsets of programming languages that are designed to be analyzable, such as SPARK, or to be less error-prone, such as Less Hatton’s SaferC. Workshop participants generally favored using better languages, for example, functional languages, such as F# or ML. However, there was no particular suggestion of the language, or languages, of the future.

We note that with few exceptions, such as Ada 2012 [Barnes13], which has SPARK, new languages have poor tool support. Supporting the construction of tools is vital for the adoption and safe use of new languages.