According to the lecture, for Ada I guess it would be winning avionics. The presentation has some interesting artifacts, such as one student asking what "portable" means and another asking what is "object-oriented" programming.

Maybe "hyped" success is sometimes confused with "real" success. The later type may not always be as visible.

He addresses this in the lecture. He suggests people often make statements about programming language usage in industry without actual knowledge of what some organizations are really using (beyond what is announced publicly, or hyped).