Is there a good book for experienced devs who want to learn a little Ada?
adaic.org/learn/materials/ - use the Distilled book and grab the extras for 2005 and 2012 from the reference manuals.
Where does Ada excel?
Anywhere.
It seems to be used mostly for large systems that need to work correctly (avionics, medical equipment, air traffic control, etc.) but are there less publicized uses where it's really good?
Ada scales well. I've done a lot of small applications without any trouble. Embedded can be small or large, again, it scales well. Embedded is just one area where Ada can be used.
For example, is anyone converting security sensitive C/C++ in operating systems into Ada?
Possibly.
Do you write Ada in an IDE? If so, which one? How about your compiler? I hear the free tools are not so great and the commercial tools are expensive.
You can use a text editor or an IDE, although the quality of IDE's for Ada vary. The commercial Ada tools have always been expensive, but GNAT from the FSF under GCC is free and you can release stuff closed source commercial if you like.
To keep you out of the debugger more.
You can use Ada for webstuff, just like people have used C and C++ for it. For example:
github.com/stcarrez
github.com/faelys/markup-ada
github.com/faelys/lithium3 - CMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxbAiuZydPE&t=14s < Ada on Rails - not open to the public though :/
adaic.org/learn/materials/ - use the Distilled book and grab the extras for 2005 and 2012 from the reference manuals.
Anywhere.
Ada scales well. I've done a lot of small applications without any trouble. Embedded can be small or large, again, it scales well. Embedded is just one area where Ada can be used.
Possibly.
You can use a text editor or an IDE, although the quality of IDE's for Ada vary. The commercial Ada tools have always been expensive, but GNAT from the FSF under GCC is free and you can release stuff closed source commercial if you like.
Thank you for the book recommendation.