Re: Another measure of Ada's rejection by corporate America

[bishopm@source.asset.com (Michael M. Bishop)]

In article <D4DFEH.EDt@world.std.com>,
Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> wrote:
>
>     Yet one more measure of the rejection of Ada in this country, and one
>more statistic that AJPO in its mismanagement of Ada policy refuses to measure.
>An article in the February 20, 1995, issue of Computerworld, page 129, on
>how companies use technical proficiency tests listed the following table on
>the top 10 computing skills tests being used by corporations:
>
>		1.	Cobol
>		2.	C
>		3.	CICS
>		4.	DB2
>		5.	C++
>		6.	Visual Basic
>		7.	Oracle
>		8.	PowerBuilder
>		9.	Unix
>		10.	DOS
>
>Yet again another measure of the lack of substantial interest in Ada where
>people are free to choose.  And yet the DoD blindly refuses to measure such
[snip]

In many cases, these corporations are not free to choose their
programming language. The reason that Cobol is number 1 is that there
are literally billions of lines of legacy source code written in Cobol.
Reengineering methods and technology have not yet matured sufficiently
to give corporate decision makers the confidence to allow their large,
important software assets to be reengineered into another language (and
possibly design paradigm). 

Besides, even if AJPO and the DoD collected such statistics, what would
you expect them to do about it? Force corporate America to adopt Ada?
Corporations won't start using Ada until there are easily accessible Ada
resources (i.e., people proficient in the language) available. That
isn't the case yet, but with grass-roots efforts like Team Ada, it may
be the case in the near future. (For example, from what I've read here,
the number of universities teaching Ada as their first language is
increasing at a steady rate.) 


-- 
| Mike Bishop              | The opinions expressed here reflect    |
| bishopm@source.asset.com | those of this station, its management, |
| Member: Team Ada         | and the entire world.                  |