I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by committee' that wasn't really the case, but did have a lot of people critiquing it. It was a great language once you understood how to structure your programs. I think it would have had much better uptake if there were free/open source implementations of it back then, but I don't think the DoD even considered that, so it cost quite a bit of money to experiment with it and very few students had a chance to use it.