Re: why ada is so unpopular ?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Been there. Done that. Got the T-Shirt. You're right that in lots of 
domains, it takes you more time to learn the domain than to learn the 
language. Managers love to hire guys who already have experience in the 
domain for exactly that reason.

But that doesn't really address the issue that a manager has when 
choosing a language. Training people is *part* of the cost, but by no 
means all of it. If you're building things using sensors and actuators 
and control algorithms like I am, then you're probably talking about 
very long-lived systems that are extremely expensive to verify. 
Especially in some environment like that, a manager doesn't want to be 
sitting on top of a dead-end language. If it becomes mostly non-existant 
in ten years and his control has to live for another 30 years, he is 
most eggregiously sexually penetrated when he has to switch to something 
else in mid-project.

I'll reiterate: Give the poor manager something he can have some 
confidence in and believe it will solve his problems and maybe he'll 
start making the decisions you want him to make. He lives or dies by 
things like cost, schedule, time-to-market, risk reduction, etc. 
Selecting some niche language with an uncertain future, a lack of 
industry support, a poverty of tools/libraries (compared to other 
choices) and a profound disinterest on the part of most of the available 
programmers out there just doesn't look like a career-enhancing move. 
Fix that and maybe he'll show more interest in the language.

MDC

Stephen Leake wrote:
> 
> In my field, the time it takes to learn Ada is quite small compared to
> the time it takes to learn how to write useful programs. The later
> involves data structures, real-time scheduling, the physics of
> actuators and sensors, and control algorithms. None of those things
> are "main stream" :).
> 
> And yet the managers still say "we can't teach people new programming
> languages". 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

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