Re: Ada rotting? (was: What ada 83 compiler is *best*)

[Marin David Condic <condicma@pwfl.com>]

Rick Thorne wrote:
> 
> Thank you for this most rational reply.  It's clear, well-composed, and
> truthful.  It does, unfortunately, also tell me the bad news: Ada's hardly
> a settled tool in our business.  Your reply, Marin, is typical of the more
> thoughtful ones: it's more "let's make Ada the technology of choice in
> spite of its lean market appeal."  A noble gesture, I think, but unlikely.
> 
I appreciate the compliment. Let me say this about the market appeal:
Ada has become entrenched rather nicely in certain parts of the market
and is not going to go away any time soon. We've built a lot of
infrastructure around Ada here at Pratt in the embedded software arena
and we're not going to give that up. There are lots of others who build
hard realtime & safety critical applications who use Ada - not because
of some "mandate" but because it is the best available tool for the job.
So while Ada may not be the language in which people are currently
building Internet applications, that doesn't mean it is going to
disappear.

As for career choices, keep in mind that a good software engineer is not
good only in one language. I've programmed embedded systems in a whole
variety of languages and while I prefer Ada, there are times when Ada is
simply not available for the job at hand, so we go with C or assembler
or whatever is needed to get the job done. So if you go off and get a
job programming in Java that doesn't mean you can't persue an interest
in Ada and potentially find ways of utilizing it either on the job or as
a sideline interest. I picked my job because I enjoy being involved in
embedded realtime systems and military hardware. The fact that this is
done largely in Ada is nice too, but if we got word tomorrow that we
were now going to program controls in Cobol, that wouldn't mean it was
time to quit.

MDC
-- 
Marin D. Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
Ph: 561.796.8997         Fx: 561.796.4669

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."

        --  G.B. Shaw