Re: Fed OOPS ... OOPS! We forgot to include Ada!

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <SRCTRAN.95Mar23081453@world.std.com>,
Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> wrote:
>
>Ada has been reduced to such a pathetic commercial state that it needs
>government (ADAIC) and academic (SIGADA) shills to promote Ada (like at
>this week's Object World in Boston), with vendors so loathe to marketing
>Ada that not once in the past six years has any Ada compiler vendor in
>any software magazine or journal run a full page ad for an Ada compiler
>with pricing for at least three months in a row.

Without taking away from most of your points, with which I mostly agree,
I do want to correct the record on one thing: SIGAda is NOT an academic
organization, if by that you mean dominated by university people. I
don;t know what the membership ratio is, but I'll bet it's not more
than 20-25% academic. And the officers and AdaLetters editor have
been almost exclusively industrial folks. K.M. George, indeed an
academic (Oklahoma State) has just taken over as editor of AdaLetters;
he is the first academic in many years (maybe EVER) to do so.

The SIGAda group that ran the exhibit at Object World consisted of
no academics at all; most of the work there was done by Charlene Roberts
Hayden, employed by GTE in the Boston area. The group at ACM Computing
Week - mostly an academic _conference_ - was Hal Hart (TRW), Rick Conn
(MITRE), and me. The SIGAda guy in charge of liaison to conferences
for the exhibit is Ed Colbert, a small-business guy who does training
and other consulting. Treasurer is David Emery (just moved from MITRE in
Mass. to Hughes in Canada; he is working on the Canadian air-traffic 
control system, in Ada of course.

Academic? Not! 

You may be right in some areas, Greg, but your notion of what SIGAda is, 
is pure B.S. Take a hint from _this_ academic (yes, I am one, chair of
the SIGAda Education Working Group, unsurprisingly): do some homework.

Mike Feldman