Re: Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

[Gordon J Dodrill <gjdodri@sandia.gov>]

Stanley Allen wrote:

> For the benefit of those of us who didn't get a chance to
> go to Tri-Ada this year, can some who did post their
> impressions of it?  How was the attendance?  The trade show?
> The entertainment?  The presentations?  The panels?

This was my first Tri-Ada since 1989 (in Pittsburgh), and I 
have not been using Ada on a regular basis, so I am probably
not the typical attendee.  My impressions follow.

When I picked up my registration materials Saturday evening,
I asked how many were registered and the lady said there were
about 325.  I never heard an official announcement of the final
total.

I picked up a fairly wide spread theme of mixing Ada with other
languages in any given project.  There was a lot of talk of
interfaces to other languages, with C++ and Java being the
languages mentioned the most.  Compiling Ada to Java bytecodes
was mentioned several times.

Our department is involved in High Integrity software development
and I was pleased to find lots of discussion and solutions to the
problem of building High Integrity software.  John Barnes gave
a four hour tutorial on High Integrity Ada, much of which is in
his new book titled, appropriately enough, "High Integrity Ada".

The return on investment was definitely better than most software
conferences I have attended.

Gordon Dodrill
Sandia National Laboratories - Albuquerque, New Mexico