alt Hacker News> The verbosity was deliberate — Ichbiah wanted programs to be readable by people other than their authors, and readability over time favours explicitness — but it was experienced as bureaucratic and un-hacker-like, and the programming culture that formed in the 1980s and 1990s was organised around the proposition that conciseness was sophistication. Ada was the language of procurement officers. C was the language of people who understood machines. The cultural verdict was delivered early and never substantially revisited.
IMO, this was the telling paragraph.
Not really. That was written by someone who doesn't really know the language and is writing from a position of hearsay.
Ada is "verbose" in that it has fairly rigorous type specification. It was verbose in comparison to languages that had weak or primitive typing. A lot of the "bureaucracy" in the language is being very specific about types to catch bugs.
Ada 83 did have a problem in that it lacked [interfaces]. This could sometimes limit code reuse.
Ada was designed to be "readable" but so was Pascal and many other languages (and, more recently for instance, Python). "Readability" in those days mainly meant preferring keywords over operators and allowing for infix notation with proper order-of-operations.