when i was first exposed to ada, early 1990's, the language was unusable. compile times where excessive (like hours). machines of that era were slow and had small memories (4MB was a common size, and more than 1 CPU was a luxury).

i must also admit, ada was hard. you had to do some mojo just to print out a value ("package int_io is new integer_io blah, blah). it had a standard of a couple of hundred pages that you kept on your desk. and you looked at it on a regular basis. and the compiler was picky (strongly typed).

companies dropped ada because they couldn't hire. C++ people were more available.

my opinion today is ada is relatively small, makes very fast code, and supports all the programming paradigms of C++ in a very sane way.

if the first ada compiler was "ada95" instead of "ada83", it would be very popular. it came out a decade before the world was ready.