I remember Ada getting pushed in a time when there were many in the computer industry that were pushing Pascal as both a systems and a teaching language. Ada was a lot like Pascal which I think caused an immediate violent reaction in some people. (e.g. the implementers of every other programming language were pissed that BASIC was so hegemonic but they never asked "Why?" or if their alternatives were really any better)

In the early 1980s, microcomputer implementations such as UCSD Pascal were absolutely horrific in terms of performance plus missing the features you'd need to do actual systems programming work. In the middle of the decade you saw Turbo Pascal which could compile programs before you aged to death and also extended Pascal sufficiently to compete with C. But then you had C, and the three-letter agencies were still covering up everything they knew about buffer overflows.