Re: is Ada dying?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Ralph M?itz" <ralph@work.co.za> wrote in message news:<Xns9133DBAF0AD71ralphworkcoza@196.25.240.158>...
> I'm just starting out learning Ada, but it seems Ada is dying. From what I 
> can see very few people use Ada, out of about 15 000 projects on 
> Sourceforge only 32 are written in Ada! I think that's sad, and now that 
> Ada's parents (the  U.S DoD) are dropping Ada 95 what does the future hold 
> in store? Is it worthwhile learning a language nobody appreciates or uses?


Isn't it odd in this field that if a technology is not
dominant (by number of applications), then it is considered
dead (examples, Pascal, PL/1, OS/2 ... all of which are
alive and used for many important applications). The trade
press has even announced that Java is dead on the client
side, and no doubt given Microsoft's decision to exclude
Java from XP, will pronounce it completely dead. Sometimes
people even decide that widely used technologies are dead.
I once heard a high up official in the DoD tell me that
no one outside the DoD used COBOL any more (that statement
was made over a year ago!)

The U.S. DoD is not "dropping Ada", to think this is as
wrong as to think that everyone in the DoD was using Ada
during the mandate. The actual fact is that, not at all
surprisingly, some people in the DoD like Ada, and fight
to do as much as possible in Ada, and some people in the
DoD dislike it, and fight to do as much as possible in
some other language (C++ or even Java).

Ada is certainly not dead, and use of Ada will continue
for a long time. Will usage increase or decrease? Hard
to say. Here at Ada Core Technologies, we see a steady
increase in use. This can of course be due to three factors

  a) people updating from Ada 83 to Ada 95
  b) people shifting from other Ada technologies to GNAT
  c) new projects being started in Ada

We certainly know some projects that are in category c, but
it is hard to know what the division between these three is. In any
case, regardless of what other vendors do, ACT
expects to be supporting Ada for a long time to come, and
to continue to do active development and enhancements to
the GNAT technology (we already have a long list of
enhancements that have been made for version 3.15). As
you know from our web site, 3.14 also had a long list of
enhancements (and we expect to see 3.14 public versions
out soon for selected targets).

If you want to learn a dominant technology that is very
widely used, I would suggest Visual Basic or COBOL, there
is a big demand for people in both areas, and these are
still among the most widely used languages. But if you
want to learn Ada, you will find that

a) You acquire skills and knowledge that are useful not
only in Ada, but in other arenas.

b) There are definitely jobs for competent Ada programmers.


Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies