To begin, Ada has not failed. Nor did the punch cards. They all have played an integral part in the evolution of other programming languages that followed. I haven't spent a lot of my time digging up history on this subject, but I'd imagine Ada, being probably one of the earliest programming languages, has succeeded in as much as it essentially established the roots of modern computational science.

You can learn considerably more about Ada here. I'm confidant that after a little bit of digging, you'll discover that Ada had very little to do with 'failure', afterall :)

update: Well, what I meant by 'not failed' assertion is that Ada has left it's mark in the field of computing science. I'm sure even Larry himself might have borrowed the better parts of it when designing Perl.

Now, when it comes to such things as web development, OOP, and modern systems development, I am not very knowledgable when it comes to Ada. From what little experience I have programming, I'm comfortable with Delphi, VB, VC++, Java, and Perl among a few other languages. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to learn much Ada. Coming to think of it, being a part of a larger community (of programmers), I might have contributed (at least a little) to the current 'pitiful' state of Ada by simply not picking up a book or two years back when I still had the time and energy to master new languages ;)

update: Abigail-II, I stand corrected and even a bit embarrassed for the grossly inacurate statement; I must have been drinking extra strong coffee at the time of the writing of my first post (or thinking of both the legacy of Ada Byron's first 'programming language' and the naming of a modern language in her honour all at the same time) ;-)

_____________________
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce
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Robert Wilensky, University of California