Re: ada in australia, to the mystery emailer

[Geoff Bull <gbull@acenet.com.au>]

G wrote:
> 
>   Someone asked me about ada in australia 
>
>   Answer is, I have no idea.  Going from the newspapers and the
> advertisements for jobs in IT sections - I have not seen Ada mentioned
> even once. 

Maybe you just didn't look hard enough amongst the sea of Visual C++ and
and Visual basic ads.

The Sydney Morning Herald's job search page,
http://www.itjobs.fairfax.com.au/ finds 19 Ada jobs.
Some of these will be duplicates at different agencies, and some
are looking for C/C++ programmers whith Ada awareness. That still leaves
maybe a half dozen jobs that you can apply for today.

Of course, searching for other languages finds a lot more jobs:
C++     :1095
Java    : 584
Basic   : 449
Perl    : 230
COBOL   : 182
Ada     :  19
Fortran :   3

At least we don't get the wooden spoon!

The press simply isn't interested in Ada.
When the Collins submarine software had performance problems,
the press blamed the hardware, there was no mention of the
language used (presumably Ada). If a journo saw the word Ada,
they probably didn't know what it was.

On the other hand, when the stock exchange implemented a new system in
C++ there was a huge write up about what they'd done to eliminate all
those pesky memory leaks that can't be tolerated in a 24x7 system.
I suspect that particular article was sponsored by a tools vendor.

Cheers
Geoff