Re: How many of you have Ada programming careers?

[Hadrien Grasland <hadrien.grasland@gmail.com>]

Hi Nick !

Myself, I learned programming in Delphi as a kid, then quickly figured out that in order to leverage third-party libraries, C and C++ were the way to go. However, I never was entirely satisfied with these languages, as their countless design errors kept jumping in my face (top pet peeves: "=" as an assignment operator AND an expression, ";" as the null statement, ill-defined int/long/short semantics, and the worst array semantics I have ever seen).

A decade later, I heard about Ada from my brother taking programming classes ("ugh, that compiler is SO annoying"), and it got me interested as I love picky compilers that help me do the right thing. After learning it, it quickly became my favorite language for hobby programming with no third-party dependencies (e.g. OSdeving).

I would love to program in Ada at work, but my professional background is in scientific computing and that realm is governed by C, C++, Fortran, and a growing fraction of Python, together with parallel-friendly extensions to these languages (OpenMP, CUDA, MPI...). From my understanding of the French job market, Ada jobs here are mostly centered on embedded and military computing, a realm where recruiters seem unwilling to take risks with job applications that have "original" backgrounds.

So I guess for now, unless I end up on a surprisingly open-minded company for my next job, Ada programming will remain a hobby for me ;)

Hadrien