Re: is ada dead?

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>]

Andrzej Lewandowski wrote:
> 
> You are in a good society. I was once teaching Real Time Programming and was
> using Ada. This was at not that bad U.S. University. Once, after the end of semester
> students brought to the Dean collection of Classified from local newspapers and
> asked him to find at least one job as that would require Ada. Dean was smart enough
> to send them away. And was smart enough to have a nice chat with me. And I was
> smart enough to spend the whole summer converting my course from Ada to C.

Do you really believe that a student graduating from an American
University with a CS degree and no professional experience is ready to 
be employed as a software engineer? I do not. Many companies I have
worked for do not. The one company most willing to hire new graduates
insisted that the new graduates could not be considered software
engineers until completing one year on the job, and that year was
spent under the close supervision of an experienced software engineer.
If, at any time, the new graduate did not appear to be progressing
properly, he or she could be terminated with no excuse or warning.

Other companies I have worked for are less enthusiastic about hiring
new graduates. They typically want three to five years experience
on an applicant's resume or cv before even considering that job
applicant.

> This decision was not irresponsible and pathetic. There is a job market for Ada
> programmers, but very (VERY) small compared to say, C++, Java, VB or COBOL.
> Students invest quite substantial amount of money to get a degree, and yes, they
> expect that this investment will bring some return. Generally, there is little room
> to study for "scientific pleasure". They are studying to get skills that will position
> them well on the job market. They will not learn Ada just this is a "better language".
> They will study the language that is visible on the market.

They study the language most visible in the job postings. That, of
course does not mean that those students will graduate with even a
shadow of the experience needed to perform the positions offered.
If those students look more closely they will see that the positions
advertised all, or mostly all, contain experience requirements.

Studying a language does not help. My experience is that companies
that do hire new graduates expect them to have some understanding of
the basic concepts of software development. They also expect to need
to train those new graduates in the processes, tools, and product
domains concerning the hiring company. This often includes training
the new graduate in the language used by the company. This training
takes about the same amount of time and effort whether or not the
graduate "learned" the language in the University classroom.

The theory used by the students is that University training and
experience really counts. In reality it does not. It is easy for
a university to support this fantasy by chasing the current
software language fad. The university can avoid a lot of meetings
with upset students. Back in the early days of civilization, when I
went through a University education, I was fed a diet of concepts
such as academic freedom, intellectual integrity, and the need for
a deep and broad education. It appears that many universities have
given up on those ideals. Instead, they have become that which they
used to despise. They have become institutions that produce 
people with narrow, and largely useless, educations, instead of
well and broadly educated people ready to build and lead their
civilizations and cultures.

> What regards using Ada in the industry: nothing will change if the average cost
> of SUPPORTED Ada tools is in high 5 digit range. Yes, Ada is better than, say,
> Java, at least for some tasks, but I cannot justify the cost just to have a pleasure
> of working with "better language". Nothing will change if Ada vendors don't drop
> one zero from their price list.

This is now, and always has been, a vacuous argument.

Look at the cost of a professional C development environment.
You need a C compiler.
You need an editor.
You need a build tool such as the Unix make program.
You need a debugger.
You need a syntax checking tool such as lint.
You need a configuration management tool.
You need a run-time profiling tool, to identify little errors
such as memory leaks and array bounds violations.

What do you need for an Ada development environment?

You need an Ada compiler (which contains a very good syntax checker,
  an editing system, and often a configuration management system).
You may need a debugger.

The cost of a C language development system often exceeds the cost
of an Ada development system. 

The real problem is that most companies have no idea how much their
software costs. Most companies have very weak software processes with
few or no meaningful software metrics. That is why most company's
software processes evaluate to CMM level 1. That is why a large
percentage of software development projects in the commercial world
are cancelled before their release date, even after the
expenditure of the equivalent of greater than 10**6 Dollars.

Companies with proper software development processes understand that
tool costs are irrelevant. Project and product failures are the real
expense.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA