If you could try to sell some of the old languages today (Ada, Fortran, Pascal, etc), what would be their elevator pitch? Are there one or two tools that could bring them back into relevance?
Fortran is pretty relevant. I keep hearing that the code it generates, in particular for number crunching, is closer to optimal than what most C compilers can generate.
That is true, and not a new story. Regarding the relevance, checkout F18 (Fortran 2018 standard). It's an awesome language for numerical computing: built-in parallelism, a high-level expression like Python/MATLAB, low-level speed similar to or better than C. hard to bit for numerical computing.