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(October 2004) Ada remains the Rodney Dangerfield of computer programming languages, getting little respect despite a solid technical rationale for its existence. Originally pressed into service by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s, these days Ada is just considered a remnant of bloated military engineering practices. In reality, Ada aids software reliability, though that benefit admittedly comes at the expense of some possibly unpleasant software-engineering work in the form of added design time and documentation overhead. Nevertheless, in a world where software developers are increasingly forced to deal with time-to-market pressures, which lead to bugs, you can’t get away from the fact that Ada enforces compile-time consistency checks. Indeed, the range and overflow checks applied by Ada compilers typically help catch more bugs earlier in the software development life cycle, where they are easier and less costly to fix and certainly less threatening.