Market demographics of OO community

Market demographics of OO community

[Gregory Aharonian]

   I recently came across an interesting book with lots of market data on
the object oriented programming marketplace.  The book is:
		1992 International OOP Directory
		Subscriber Services
		P.O. Box 3000
		Department DIR
		Denville, NJ 07834    212-274-0640    $69 + $4

   I did a quick count of companies and products by language (with products
covering the range of microcomputer, workstations and mainframes):


				# COMPANIES		# PRODUCTS

		C/C++		    102			    175
		Smalltalk	     53			     93
		Lisp		     20			     33
		Pascal		     14			     25
		Ada		     13			     22
		Actor		      7			     13


    As with other demographic surveys, such as help wanted ads for software
engineers, and advertisements in software engineering publications, we see
that Ada acceptance, many years after good compilers have been available
and billions of dollars of funding for projects using Ada, that Ada still
is not winning much market share outside the Mandate world where people 
have to spend their own money.  The DoD, the compiler vendors, the CASE
contractors, despite the billions at their collective disposal, either
don't want to or don't know how to make the case for Ada.

    You name a statistical measure of activity for software use and collect
the numbers both in and outside the Mandated world, and the results, like
these and others I have posted, will show Ada making little headway.  Sure
postings like Mike's show that Ada has made some headway, and many of the
comments on comp.lang.ada solidly argue of the benefits to everyone if Ada
made more headway outside the Mandated world, but one statistic after
another shows that Ada is not just being accepted.

    Thus to some extent, outside the Mandated world, it is mostly irrelevant
what the Ada9X effort is doing, as its impact will be minor.  And if people
inside the Mandated world decide to stick with Ada83 for reliability reasons
and fear of the risk of using a "new" langauge, then the return on the
tax investment of the Ada9X effort becomes questionable, which is a completely
separate issue of how technically proficient the Ada9X effort and end result
will be.

    It would be interesting to see a posting from the Ada9X staff on their
views of the lack of market acceptance of Ada83, its implications for market
acceptance of Ada9X, and what their office is doing to ensure that Ada9X
will be more successfully commercially than Ada83.  In fact, it would be
interesting to see a posting from the Ada9X staff on anything, since many
with an interest in Ada9X and not part of the process do read comp.lang.ada.
It amazes me that the DoD is so incapable of using the free medium of
comp.lang.ada to distribute information.  Every month I come across half a
dozen Ada systems in DTIC technical reports that are publicly available for
which there authors, all with net access, never post a word on the existence
of their programs.

    The Ada Mandate is a government imposed distortion of the marketplace,
and is worthwhile only if someone assumes responsibility for assuming that
the distortions lead to benefits.  Until someone does accept responsibility,
statistics like the ones I posted above will continue to speak unfavorably
of Ada, no matter how fantastic the language is.

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization

-- 
**************************************************************************
Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178