Re: Mike Feldman, meet Archie

[emery@mitre-bedford.arpa (David Emery)]

>    Now if people in the DoD were serious about making Ada an accepted
>language outside of the Mandated world, in the formal business sense of
>launching a product, the first business thing to do would be to do a
>comprehensive survey of Ada use in the non-Mandated world, for example,
>by doing methodical Archie and WAIS surveys, contacting software
>development companies, scanning thousands of technical reports with
>source code listings, searches of universities theses, commercial CDROMS
>with source code, counting job requirements in help wanted ads for languages
>listed, and other areas to find out usage trends for programming

I agree that there is room for a serious Ada study, but in the list
Greg mentions, the *only* thing that counts is "contacting software
development companies."  The reason is that 'real developers' are too
busy doing 'real work' to write tech reports, and they generally do
not place their code in the public domain.  Studying Archie and WAIS
databases, technical reports, university theses, etc, will generally
reveal the state of the practice in the research community, which is
different than the state of practice in the commercial world.  

What's most important is finding those companies that are using Ada
when they don't have to, and capitalizing on lessons learned from
them.  Some companies using Ada have declined to answer such surveys,
citing their reasons for Ada as a competitive advantage.  Others have
been more open. 

On the other hand, as has been said many times, choice of language is
*not* generally a technical decision.  The fact that Ada was developed
by the DOD tends to prejudice it in the eyes of many who believe that
anything having to do with the military is inherently evil.  This is
particularly true in academic settings...

				dave