The future of Ada

[Gordon Dodrill <gjdodri@sandia.gov>]

A few weeks ago someone in this newsgroup mentioned that 
Ada is a $100M industry.  If this number is reasonable, 
then assuming a loaded salary of $120K per year, there are
only about 830 full time Ada developers.

I attended the JavaOne conference in the spring of 1998 
which had over 15,000 in attendance.  I also attended the 
SigAda conference in St Louis in the Fall of 1997, which
had less than 400 in attendance.  I understand that the
Software Development conference (West), which is heavily
oriented toward C++, is still attracting about 6,000 
attendees

I am completely sold on Ada concerning its type safety and
its economy of use.  In fact, I am the local Ada evangelist
and successfully convinced a group of 18 developers to use
Ada on a new project.  This involved teaching a beginning 
class in Ada myself, then having Ben Brosgol teach an 
advanced Ada class at our location last May.

Ten months into the project, the project leader announced
very abruptly that Ada would be scrapped, C++ would be used,
and there would be a six month slip in the project to permit
training in C++ and rewriting the  completed Ada code.  His 
reason - "There may not be any Ada programmers to do 
maintenance several years from now, but we will always be 
able to get C++ programmers."

I am obviously frustrated.  How can I continue to promote 
the use of Ada when the numbers mentioned in the first two 
paragraphs above indicate a lack of growth in Ada compared
to the other languages?  Any thoughts, either positive or
negative, will be appreciated.

Gordon Dodrill
Sandia National Laboratories - Albuquerque, New Mexico