Still no Ada jobs in Boston, or anywhere

Still no Ada jobs in Boston, or anywhere

[Gregory Aharonian]

    Despite the ongoing fabrications of Ada contractors and vendors (and
I just saw a report that none of the custom Ada software to glue the COTS
stuff for RCAS has ever been fielded), Ada is still being rejected outside
the Mandated world where people are free to choose and spend their own money
making programming language decisions. That the DoD continues to ignore this
double standard in yet another new year, even while the majority of the DoD
does not use Ada, is disappointing.

    The first Boston Sunday Globe of each year tends to have a big help wanted
section, this year being over 100 pages of jobs from all sorts of companies in
the Boston area, big and small, financial, technical, medical, etc.  Here is
a count of help wanted positions per language requested:

			C/C++		404

			Cobol		 45
			Basic		 44   (mostly Visual Basic)
			VHDL		 37
			HTML		 20
			Java		 18

			Perl		  9
			Smalltalk	  8
			RPG		  7
			Autocad		  7
			Ada		  7

All of the Ada jobs were defense related.  Not all defense jobs required Ada.
Can the DoD design languages that meet a need?  Sure, look at VHDL.  Can the
DoD design a language that doesn't meet a need?  Sure, year after year, no
one is hiring Ada.  Sure there are Ada jobs not being so advertised, but there
are also many jobs in other languages not being advertised.  In the end, the
percentages won't change much - Ada is a 1% niche language.

DISA's ongoing refusal to seek the truth shouldn't be rewarded with our taxes.

Greg Aharonian