Ada Germany at the OOP'97

Ada Germany at the OOP'97

[Debora Weber-Wulff]

I spent a day at the OOP'97 in Munich at the Ada stand. Yes, you read right,
the special interest group "Ada-Deutschland" of the Gesellschaft fuer
Informatik (GI, sort of an ACM in Germany) operated a stand amongst all the
other famous OO-companies. Our fearless leader, Peter Dencker, twisted some
arms to get us the stand. Okay, we were back by the restrooms, but it was
the best spot in the Sheraton for using a handy, so we did have some
traffic ;-)

It was a lot of "preaching to the converted", but gosh, it was nice to see
all those converted people! Volker Oertel (oertel@fh-albsig.de) reports that 
his college (FH Albstadt-Sigmaringen) is using Ada as a first language and is 
very happy with it. We had a real-live Ada user there, too! Michael Paus from 
the Department of Flight Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart had a nice
application in flight simulation on display 
(michael.paus@ifr.luftfahrt.uni-stuttgart.de).

Since we were a number of people on the stand we got to sneak out to a 
lecture. I chose Tucker Taft talking about his AdaMagic. Wonderful, wonderful,
what a great idea! I did not get to visit the other lectures, but I heard that
they were good, too.

After the business meeting we adjorned to the Schneiderweisse Beer Cellar
for some of that Munich local color...

We have a new Web page at http://www.ada-deutschland.de, set up by Hubert
Keller. It's all in German, of course...

What do we need? More textbooks in GERMAN like Mike Feldmann's, lots of
CD to hand out (it is too much of a barrier to just state the URL of
the Ada repositories, many companies in Germany do not have Internet
access, but they *do* have CD-ROM readers), more success stories in
Germany. We've decided to open up an anonymous "confessional booth" on
our home page, so that people can report on things they did wrong and how
they learned from them (like not using exceptions to jump out of a deep
nest of procedure calls in the hopes of speeding things up...). Coming
soon to the homepage!


--
Debora Weber-Wulff (Professorin fuer Softwaretechnik und Programmiersprachen)
Technische Fachhochschule Berlin, FB Informatik, Luxemburger Str. 10, 
13353 Berlin, Germany        email: weberwu@tfh-berlin.de   
<http://www.tfh-berlin.de/~weberwu/>