From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,f49c8f164340c377 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!l22g2000prc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Maciej Sobczak Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Current status of Ada? Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 01:44:10 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1187772250.820301.151700@l22g2000prc.googlegroups.com> References: <1187726191.464593.16480@r34g2000hsd.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 137.138.37.241 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1187772251 19201 127.0.0.1 (22 Aug 2007 08:44:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:44:11 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.12) Gecko/20070724 Red Hat/1.5.0.12-0.3.slc3 Firefox/1.5.0.12,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: l22g2000prc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=137.138.37.241; posting-account=ps2QrAMAAAA6_jCuRt2JEIpn5Otqf_w0 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:1532 Date: 2007-08-22T01:44:10-07:00 List-Id: On 22 Sie, 02:15, Jeffrey Creem 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/