This will be the perspective of someone from outside the Ada community who found he really liked the language, and the challenges I faced learning Ada from online materials, converting the Words source code to more idiomatic (post Ada-83) forms, adopting the tooling, accessing community support, finding collaborators, making Ada play nicely with the Web, and so on.

Whitaker's Words may be one of the most widely-used pieces of Ada software, and a quick Twitter search suggests it plays a key role in helping students cheat on their Latin translation homework. As a linguist and hacker, what really interests me is the use of Ada's type system to encode Latin's grammar.