When Ada came out a lot of programmers couldn't even touch type. You're right there's a generational change and a lot of of the Ada stuff won:
* strong typing
* lots of annotations
* keywords over syntax, support for long variable and token names
* object focus (Ada 83 had some limitations on inheritance so it wasn't OO strictly speaking)
* exceptions
* large standard library
These things were controversial in the 1980s. They are not today.
