Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

[mark_lundquist@my-deja.com]

In article <3A031100.68F2B59@netwood.net>,
  "E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net> wrote:
> mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > I think COTS is a natural area to focus on for growing the Ada
market.
>
> Perhaps.
> But Ada programmers don't appear to be interested.

What would it mean for Ada programmers to be interested in growing the
Ada market in the COTS segment?  How would that growth area depend on
Ada programmers being interested?  (Seems more to depend upon the
interest of those who would *pay* Ada programmers :-)

> No Ada programmers have expressed an interest
> in an Ada language binding for the VSIPL API standard.
> I don't think that a single Ada programmer has ever participated
> in the discussion on the VSIPL Form web page
>
>     http://www.vsipl.org/

I can envision a number of possible reasons why that might be, so
without knowing anything about it, it's hard for me to draw any
conclusions...

You've got to admit that vector processing is a somewhat narrow
specialty, though.

> Ada programmers don't appear to be much interested
> in numerical computing at all.

I would say that programmers in general are not interested in numerical
computing!  Most of computing is not numerics.  (Nothing against it...)

You seem to be in a double-minority: deeply interested in numerics and
vector processing, and also an Ada advocate :-)

> I don't think that anyone uses Ada for numerical computing anymore.
> There are, at best, only some adapter interfaces
> for numerical libraries written in Fortran and/or C.

What would you like to see in the way of Ada support for numeric
computing?

> I think that many people in the military believe that
> they have been abandoned by the Ada community.

Interesting... what kind of support do you think these people in the
military would have wanted to have from the "Ada community"?  (Are you
talking about Ada vendors here, third-party tool vendors, or what?)

I work for Rational Software in the Ada products group, and have for a
long time -- way back for Verdix Corp. and then w/ Rational when the
two companies merged.  I was a developer until 1-1/2 years ago, then
moved to a developer role in a different part of Rational's business
for about a year, then went back to the Ada products group, now as part
of the product management team.  So I'm very interested in what people
think the Ada vendors ought to be doing, different perspectives on the
Ada market, where it's going and how to grow it, etc.

Mark Lundquist
Rational Software



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