Don't know about Modula, but have you tried Ada? The usability of it is nowhere near modern languages IMO. We learned a lot about nice code since then :-)
Some of us like readable languages not composed of hieroglyphs.
Ada was and still is a quite modern language, designed for software development done by large teams, where I can several years later still understand what I wrote.
Modula 2 is much like C in it's close-to-the-metal performance abilities.
On the downside, if you want to call it that, is a more prominent syntax (keywords instead of curlies, upper-case keywords, etc).
On the upside it lacks any unsafe operations, except for dealloc. In addition, it has actual modules in lieu of includes, hence it's blazingly fast to compile and/or recompile. It'a a pity it didn't catch on, the language lacked a company to back and promote it. AT&T promoted C, Apple promoted Objective C, Microsoft promoted VB...
Actually Apple promoted Object Pascal, but then they decided to cater to the growing UNIX market and replaced the Mac OS SDK with C and C++ (PowerPlant) one.
I mean, Ada was spec'd to run flight computers for military aircraft and similar mission-critical stuff. If you want something that is secure, Ada can do it. It just won't offer many creature comforts in doing so...
