Re: Current status of Ada?

[roderick.chapman@googlemail.com]

>On Aug 26, 6:51 pm, <adawo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

A few responses to a subset of Richard's points:

> There is no single strong advocate for Ada at present.   There is no powerful
> corporate sponsor as there is for Java.  There is no major Ada project that
> is visible to the larger community of software developers.

You don't consider iFACTS to be a "major" Ada project?  Perhaps you
don't think it counts becuase it's based in the UK?


> JSF is being developed in C++.

I think we should wait for results from JSF before jumping to
any conclusions...


> When have we last seen any publicity about the value of Ada for some major project?

See PR stuff on Praxis and AdaCore sites - iFACTS for a start.

> At present, I am the last hold-out for
> keeping
> Ada in some small part of our curriculum.

I would suggest keeping SPARK on the curriculum and just quietly
forget to tell your colleagues that it's Ada... :-)

I can think of one US government agency that's very interested
in having faculty teach strong software engineering, static
verification, formal methods and so on: the NSA.  We have several
such universities doing so right now, using SPARK as the primary
vehicle.

 - Rod, SPARK Team