Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

["Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com>]

Here are some interesting facts.  Boeing out of St. Louis actively recruits
Truman State University's students.  Two of the reasons that they give to
students on why they recruit at Truman are 1) Truman graduates are well
educated and 2) Truman teaches Ada as a first language.  If there are
companies that worry about the supply of Ada programmers, you can also point
them to Truman as a small but steady source of quality computer scientists
that know (and in most cases appreciate) Ada.

-CRM
Truman Alumni ;)

"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0204170529.6338a5f9@posting.google.com...
> > Marin David Condic wrote:
> >
> > > From rumors I've heard Boeing is drifting away from Ada for a lot of
the
> > > same reasons as other aerospace firms - the programmers want to work
in
> > > something more marketable.
>
> A common but highly irresponsible behavior on the web and usenet is to
> post rumours when you really don't know any facts. So often, these rumours
> quickly get taken as fact, and it is often the case that they have no
> grounding in fact at all.
>
> In fact the situation at Boeing is that some programs are using Ada and
> some are not. Some new developments are using Ada, some are not. I doubt
> anyone has meaningful overall figures that would support a conclusion
> of whether overall use is increasing at Boeing or not. Most certainly from
> ACT's point of view, we see an increase in use of Ada at Boeing, but
that's
> only one point of view :-)
>
> The use of Ada is of course subject to competition. We will lose some and
> win some. When you lose, you try to learn, but it is singularly unhelpful
> to draw broad conclusions.
>
> I can certainly say that ACT is a company that is essentially 100% devoted
> to Ada based products, and we see our business expanding steadily. I can't
> speak for other Ada companies, but I can certainly be confident that
neither
> Ada nor ACT are about to disappear in the forseeable future.
>
> I suggest people spend less time in uninformed discussions on the future
of
> Ada use, and more time in contributing to the technical base :-)
>
> Robert Dewar
> Ada Core Technologies