I too, encountered Ada in college (around 1990, give or take a year) and yes, compared to other languages I was familiar with at the time (BASIC, Pascal, assemb

I too, encountered Ada in college (around 1990, give or take a year) and yes, compared to other languages I was familiar with at the time (BASIC, Pascal, assembly, C, Fortran) it was quite verbose and the compiler (we had to log into the VAX system to use it) was very fussy---to the point where we joked that once we got past the compiler, the program would not crash (now, whether it would produce the correct output remained to be seen). It's amusing to think these days that C++ is probably larger and more complex than Ada ever was (or even is) but that it crept slowly to that complexity level, whereas Ada was "large" at the start but hasn't gotten much bigger. It seems that if you want a large language to be popular, you should start with a small language and grow it over a twenty year period.