From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,bb914eb8d6050e3a,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-03-24 07:56:26 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: sparky!uunet!world!srctran From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Market demographics of OO community Message-ID: Sender: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Organization: The World Distribution: comp.lang.ada,comp.software-eng Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1993 15:49:31 GMT Date: 1993-03-24T15:49:31+00:00 List-Id: 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