One thing I would add to that is that Ada at that time (Ada83, that is; Ada95 fixes this) lacked function pointers. There was no mechanism in the language to su

One thing I would add to that is that Ada at that time (Ada83, that is; Ada95 fixes this) lacked function pointers. There was no mechanism in the language to support the runtime selection of behavior that function pointers allow. Such a feature was intentionally left out of the language in order to facilitate static analysis. For the class of problems where you are willing to accept decreased expressiveness in order to get increased reliability (e.g. missile guidance software), Ada is great. But in a lot of application development scenarios, expressiveness is important. As I said above, Ada95 fixed this, but it is still a bit cumbersome and before one could reliably use Ada95, it was necessary to indirect through C to do things dynamically.