Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

["E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net>]

mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:

> E. Robert Tisdale wrote:
>
> > mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > > I think COTS is a natural area to focus on
> > > for growing the Ada market.
> >
> > Perhaps.
> > But Ada programmers don't appear to be interested.
>
> What would it mean for Ada programmers to be interested
> in growing the Ada market in the COTS segment?
> How would that growth area
> depend upon Ada programmers being interested?
> (Seems more to depend upon the interest of those
>  who would *pay* Ada programmers :-)
>
> > No Ada programmers have expressed an interest
> > in an Ada language binding for the VSIPL API standard.
> > I don't think that a single Ada programmer has ever participated
> > in the discussion on the VSIPL Form web page
> >
> >     http://www.vsipl.org/
>
> I can envision a number of possible reasons why that might be,
> so without knowing anything about it,
> it's hard for me to draw any conclusions...
>
> You've got to admit that
> vector processing is a somewhat narrow specialty, though.
>
> > Ada programmers don't appear to be much interested
> > in numerical computing at all.
>
> I would say that programmers in general
> are not interested in numerical computing!
> Most of computing is not numerics.  (Nothing against it...)
>
> You seem to be in a double-minority:
> deeply interested in numerics and vector processing,
> and also an Ada advocate :-)
>
> > I don't think that anyone uses Ada for numerical computing anymore.
> > There are, at best, only some adapter interfaces
> > for numerical libraries written in Fortran and/or C.
>
> What would you like to see in the way of Ada support
> for numeric computing?
>
> > I think that many people in the military believe that
> > they have been abandoned by the Ada community.
>
> Interesting...
> What kind of support do you think these people in the military
> would have wanted to have from the "Ada community"?
> (Are you talking about Ada vendors here,
>  third-party tool vendors, or what?)
>
> I work for Rational Software in the Ada products group
> and have for a long time -- way back for Verdix Corp.
> and then w/ Rational when the two companies merged.
> I was a developer until 1-1/2 years ago,
> then moved to a developer role in a different part of Rational's business
> for about a year, then went back to the Ada products group,
> now as part of the product management team.
> So I'm very interested in what people think
> the Ada vendors ought to be doing,
> different perspectives on the Ada market,
> where it's going and how to grow it, etc.

I would expect someone from the Ada community to
  participate in the VSIPL Forum (come to meetings),
  propose an Ada language binding for the VSIPL API
  and implement a high performance VSIPL library
  with an Ada language binding for one or more of the
  embedded DSP chips which support an Ada compiler.

Numerical applications,
especially digital signal and image processing applications,
are very near and dear to the heart of the U.S. Military.
The U.S. Military has been reaching out to the Ada community
for decades now but the Ada community does not reach back.
I can find dozens of high performance numerical libraries
implemented in C and C++ but almost none in Ada.

Should the Military train Ada programmers to maintain
applications written in Ada and also train them to program
in C an C++ so that they can maintain numerical applications?
I think that they believe that they are better off with programmers
who are proficient in a general purpose computer programming
language like C or C++ instead of investing in what appears to be
a special purpose computer programming language like Ada.