Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <V_hB5.59429$dZ2.20181071@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
  "James Boucher" <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
> I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer
> from the old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD.
> DEAD.


Well I won't comment specifically on this piece of nonsense,
but I do have a general comment, applicable to Ada folks
as well, that it is remarkable how people are ready to assume
that a technology is dead just because they don't use it
any more.

All the time I meet people

  o  who think Pascal is not used for serious industrial
     projects any more (or perhaps never was).

  o  who think that OS/2 is no longer in use

  o  who think that PL/1 is no longer in use

You even find more ludicrous examples, such as people who
think that COBOL is no longer in use.

When our department at NYU sat down to discuss the PL to use
in the first year course a couple of years ago, I was quite
appalled to hear a professor say that he thought one of the
reasons that we should stop teaching Pascal was that it was
not used commercially. I asked him how he knew, and without
hesitation, he said "well I never encountered it" -- this
was someone with minimal experience with *ANY* real world
software. It is particularly ironic to make this statement
in New York City, where the Metropolitan Transport Authority
has till recently used primarily Pascal for many technical
functions (I say till recently, since the most recent
new contract has switched to the Matra code which is in Ada).

During this same conversation, the argument trotted out in
favor of Java was that it was widely used in industry.

Again, no one actually knew this to be the case (and indeed
examples of successful large scale use of Java are actually
few and far between). But they thought it was, so that was
good enough.

Of course an honest reaction to the bogus argument that one
should teach a widely used language would be that the only
reasonable choices are Visual Basic or COBOL, but I can promise
that virtually all the faculty members around that or any
similar table in the US are (a) quite ignorant about these
two languages and (b) quite sure they want to stay ignorant :-)

Robert Dewar


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