Re: Ada's Slide To Oblivion ...

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Like I said - it depends on what you want to count. We could discuss that
until the cows come home. Clearly, some consumer-oriented box with 5000
lines of C code in it is not really in the same league with an F-22 with
millions of lines of Ada code in it. But last I heard the government was
only going to buy a few hundred F-22s over the project life whereas the
little 5000 line C doohickie might be selling in the millions of units. So
which is the more "important" project and how would you stack them up with
respect to which is the more "important" programming language for embedded
systems?

I still don't think that any way you want to count it that Ada is going to
score as a major player in the embedded computing world anymore. It's kind
of relegated to the "also ran" category - which is a shame because lots of
people will admit that it really is a good language for embedded computing.
There are just a lot of factors that hinder its success in this area.

I think that as Ada continues to grow in the non-embedded fields it will
start encouraging more usage in the embedded world. Tools become more
prevalent and experience builds with it and along the way it will trickle
into the embedded world. But it will be a slow process and it is dependent
on how successfully Ada penetrates the more "normal" sorts of application
development.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"David Gillon" <david.gillon@baesystems.com> wrote in message
news:3C5A8A09.95084CAD@baesystems.com...
>
> I suspect this may be the case. A more interesting set of figures (ok,
> more flattering to Ada) might be man years of effort, or project value.
> 1 Ada box going into F-22, 777 or whatever will likely take considerably
> more effort and earn more value than a dozen C boxes running
> air-conditioning systems.
>