This is also why car makers name their cars things like "Jeep Expedition" or "Ford Escape". The name doesn't change the car, but it does make it more exciting.

A large segment in this article (which is great overall) focuses on this decision. The short summary is "hiring Ada developers was hard and middleware and tooling were difficult to acquire."

While I've moved through a lot of parts of the software industry and may just be out of touch, I actually feel that this may be less the case today. I've seen a lot of school programs focus less on specific languages and frameworks and more on fundamental concepts, and with more "esoteric" languages becoming popular in the mainstream, I actually think hiring Ada developers would be a lot easier today (plus, big industry players like NVIDIA are back to using Ada since AdaCore have been so effective at pushing SPARK, which probably helps too).

These days they are even more comfortable using C++ than they were back then due to improvements in process, tooling, and language.

> MISRA-C was used as the basis for the C applications and a coding standards was developed with the assistance of Bjarne Stroustrup, original author of the C++ language. For both C and C++ Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools are used to ensure that restricted features are not utilized. Arguments about the lack of reliability in either C or C++ are addressed by programming standards restrictions and SCA checks. In truth, this approach is probably more consistent and robust than the manual checks used for previous development efforts including Ada.