Re: Current status of Ada?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

On 22 Sie, 02:15, Jeffrey Creem <j...@thecreems.com> wrote:

> And it is fair the say that the survey under-reports as many people
> working DoD related projects
[...]

It is interesting, but the problem is really in what kind of
information this survey is expected to provide. For the sake of mental
experiment, let's assume that 50% of Ada projects are classified. At
first sight, the survey under-reports by 50%. But if the survey is
supposed to provide some insight on how strong and vibrant is the Ada
community (for example, the requester wants to be sure that she will
not be left alone with her problems), then the survey is 100% exact,
because it comes from those contributions that actually form that
vibrant and responsive part of the community. Anybody else is
effectively out of the community.

It is more or less analogous to the report that says that we might
have fuel problems within the next N years. Does it under-reports the
reality considering the fact that there are whole *planets* in our
solar system that are composed almost entirely of methane or hydrogen?
They might be somewhere there to look at, but are effectively
unreachable in the same N-years timeframe, and so are completely
useless in this context.

What I want to say is that every time a similar question is raised,
the Ada community tries to "pump up" or visually inflate itself by
mentioning some nebulous DoD or otherwise classified activity. This is
cheating - the Ada community is effectively as strong as the number of
people that are able and willing to talk about their experiences.
Everything that is outside of this is just as useful as hydrogen on
Jupiter.

--
Maciej Sobczak
http://www.msobczak.com/