Re: Are there noticable differences in Ada acceptance by country?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Mike Silva writes:
> Some comments about Ada in the UK made me wonder about this.  Are
> there countries where the programming and/or management culture
> seems to be more accepting of Ada?  Are there Ada "hotbeds" about in
> the world?  And if so, what accounts for the differences?

Ada is like computers; it developed top-down. It was initially
military (like the ENIAC for nuclear weapons research), then spread to
the top end of civil applications (like the first civil mainframes in
the largest banks, or supercomputers in the top research labs), and
then down to more and more mundane applications.  It touched the
bottom when it became possible to write web applications in Ada :)

Not many countries build jet airplanes, satellites, or nuclear power
plants.  These are the countries where you're likely to find the most
Ada software engineers, because that's where Ada came from.

Unfortunately, this elite language for software engineers competes
against lesser languages trying to move up the ladder: C and its
offspring for "hackers", visual or scripting languages for "dummies",
and Lisp and company for "computer scientists".  Why?  Because very
few people want to be software engineers and would rather be hackers,
dummies or computer scientists.  Why?  Because being an elite software
engineer is as difficult as building a deep space probe.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.