Re: The future of Ada

[Tucker Taft <stt@averstar.com>]

Gordon Dodrill wrote:
> 
> 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.

The $100M number refers to the Ada *tools* market.
If you figure an average serious Ada developer spends $5K/year
on tools, then that comes out to 20,000 Ada developers.
In other words, the Ada application development market is orders of
magnitude larger than the Ada tools market.

> ...
> 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.

The number of serious Ada developers is in the 10s of
thousands, the number of developers with Ada experience
is in the 100s of thousands.

In any case, you will never sell Ada on the availability of
"Ada" programmers.  However, hiring based strictly
on specific programming langauge experience is a big mistake.
If a programmer can be truly successful in C++, then chances
are they can be extremely successful in Ada.  It is significantly
easier to succeed using Ada, even given the need to learn the
language as part of building or maintaining the system.  
An Ada compiler helps significantly in the training process,
because it is so good at finding "silly" mistakes, and pointing
out inconsistencies.  Compilers for other languages are often
of little or no help in training, and leave the programmer with
plenty of "silly" mistakes to dig out through long and painful
debugging sessions.

But I presume you know all of this.  You need to explain this
to your management as well.  Ada is a tool, not a religion.
It is a much better tool than most other languages for creating
reliable systems.  Good programmers can be trained in the use
of this tool, just like any other.  And in fact, Ada comes with
a ready made training tool -- the compiler.

> Gordon Dodrill
> Sandia National Laboratories - Albuquerque, New Mexico

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@averstar.com   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions  (www.averstar.com/tools)
AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.)   Burlington, MA  USA