You can as well reap the few benefits you gain out of it before throwing it away.
But how long would you want to run them? In theory, they'll be switched off at EOL. In practice, they'll keep running them well past their useful / safe life. Just take the Belgian power stations Tihange and Doel with their 6000+ micro-fissured reactors they keep on running by extending the deadlines over and again... until they'll finally give and we'll get a Chernobyl II with fallout all over the densely populated Rhine Area (think Cologne, Duesseldorf, the Ruhr-Area etc).
As to Ada... I've coded in Ada too back then, and I know of some big code-bases that are rock solid in Ada. Unfortunately, there is a severe shortage of Ada programmers who are willing to maintain those code-bases, so what happens is that a lot of money is being thrown at converting all that Ada code to C++ code, using semi-automated tools where possible. This auto-generated C++ code is then manually re-validated by C++ hackers (and that's what is so costly), and from here on, it will persist as C++ code, maybe for decades.
That's the way it goes. A language may have merits of its own, but if it is not popular and if you can't get enough people to maintain your sizeable code-bases, that language is ultimately of no use. C++ seems like a good compromise between openness, royalties/patent-lessness, speed, type safety, maintainability (when done right!), and long-term maintainability through coders. Despite its known shortcomings. No Rust, not even Ada can beat that.
Maybe someday someone will figure out how to use C++ in a clean, nice looking style. Then I'll use it. Until then, I'm staying away.
You may also make suggestions and contribute to shape the next iterations of the C++ standard...
Personally, I really like what has become of C++ since C++11, and I'm seeing that C++17 is getting some real nice additions in the Standard Library too. What I'm still missing though: standardized networking (Boost.ASIO looks like a monster at this stage, don't know if that would or even should make it into the ISO standard anytime soon). Missing networking is a big minus IMHO. I also consider the difficulty of writing more specialized streams, e.g. for encryption etc. a small minus... but that may only be me not yet grokking enough the iostreams / streambuf library design to extend it that way.
Save for that, C++11's style and philosophy is something you get used to after a while. It takes some time to finally "get it" and get the hang out of it. That's not just a couple of syntactic rules and keywords and weird ways to write templates and template specializations and throw in iterator flavors everywhere where you don't expect them to come up, it is more than that. Once you finally reach some stage of enlightenment, you'll start to really like C++ and will start coding in it as it was supposed to be and designed to be. I know, it sounds like a pathetic excuse for not being easily accessible...
Knowing some classical math won't really help you with floating point
No, not if you keep using that old 1st gen Pentium CPU in the basement...
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst
