Prior to starting to research Ada, I sat in my office frustrated with Python
for my free time hackery. Don't get me wrong, I **love** the Python language,
I have enjoyed the ease of use, dynamic model, rapid prototyping and expressiveness of the
Python language, I just fall into slumps occasionally where some of Python's
"quirks" utterly infuriating. Quirks such as its loosey-goosey type system
(which I admittedly take advantage of often), lack of **good** concurrency in
the language, import subsystem which has driven lesser men mad and its
difficulty in scaling organically for larger projects (I've not yet seen a large
Python codebase that hasn't been borderline "clusterfuck".)
Before you whip out the COBOL and Fortran jokes, I'd like to let it known up
front that Ada is a *modern* language (as I [mentioned on reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eh462/ada_surely_you_jest_mr_pythonman/c181zqy), the first Ada specification was in 1983, 11 years after C debuted, and almost 30 years after COBOL and Fortran were designed). It was most recently updated with the
"Ada 2005" revision and supports a lot of the concepts one expects from modern
programming languages. For me, Ada has two strong-points that I find
attractive: extra-strong typing and built-in concurrency.
### Incredibly strong typing
The typing in Ada is unlike anything I've ever worked with before, coming from
a C-inspired languages background. Whereas one might use the plus sign operator
in Python to add an `int` and a `float` together without an issue, in Ada
there's literally **zero** auto-casting (as far as I've learned) between types.
To the inexperienced user (read: me) this might seem annoying at first, but
it's fundamental to Ada's underlying philosophy of "no assumptions." If you're
passing an `Integer` into a procedure that expects a `Float`, there will be no
casting, the statement will error at compile time.
### Concurrency built-in
Unlike C, Java, Objective-C and Python (languages I've used before), Ada has
concurrency defined as part of the language, as opposed to an abstraction on
