Re: Ada, "Software Fantasyland," and Quick Courses

[beal@mussel.cis.ohio-state.edu (Alan Beal)]

In article <6660@siemens.UUCP> balcer@gypsy.siemens.com (Marc J Balcer) writes:
>When I first taught the course, a local DoD contractor sent about 15
>of its people to "take the course and learn Ada."  I had been assured
>that all of these people were "experienced programmers and software
>managers."  However I soon learned that the depth of experience for
>most of them was assembly languages and CMS-2 on a single project.
>Most had learned programming while in the service, or had been
>"promoted" from computer operations.  Not only were many unfamilar
>with high-level languages, I had to justify structured programming!
>Strong typing was something to be defeated.  (Was I naive for making
>assumptions about their background?)

   This is a common problem in the government.  The majority of the 
   government's software is in COBOL, and a good many of its programmers
   know nothing about C, PASCAL, etc.  The major reason for this is that
   the government can not recruit people with any type of CS degree.  How
   many CS majors out there would be willing to start at $14,000?  But a
   lot of secretaries, computer operators, and low level managers are 
   willing to become 'programmers' in order to reap the riches of computer
   industry.  I worked for the government for awhile and everything was
   done in COBOL with a little systems work done in Algol(Burroughs shop).
   Management kept saying that the DOD had mandated ADA as a programming
   language of the future but from what I saw, only about 10% of the
   programmers would be able to comprehend ADA or would be willing to try.
   Personally, I don't see the government completely switching from COBOL to ADA
   because of the expense of conversion, cost of training, and resistance
   to change.  However, the trend in the government is to contract out this
   type of work, so who knows.

-=-
 Alan Beal
 The Ohio State University
 Department of Computer and Information Science
 beal@cis.ohio-state.edu      {pyramid,killer}!osu-cis!cis.ohio-state.edu!beal