Re: Decline?

[Gene <gene.ressler@gmail.com>]

On Mar 12, 8:42 pm, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> Thomas writes:
> > gp...@axonx.com wrote:
>
> >> If popularity is the major criteria to choose the language we all
> >> should use VB.
>
> >> George.
>
> > Hehe, good point.
>
> > I'm not so much worried about the popularity thing - it's more the
> > "nonexistent future" statement that made me wonder.
>
> The paper was published in 2003 and stated the future was "dubious or
> nonexistent".  Since then:
>
> * a new revision of the language was published.
> * AdaCore and the FSF made several major releases of their compiler and IDE;
> * Aonix released their Eclipse Ada plug-in;
> * AdaControl (several releases);
> * Ada Web Server (several releases);
> * PolyORB (several releases);
> * the GNU Ada Project was started;
> * the amount of Ada sources shipped as part of Debian went from 576 kSLOC
>   to 1 MSLOC (June 2005) to 1.3 MSLOC (April 2007);
> * the professional Ada conferences continued to take place;
> * Ada was featured at the "Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre" in 2004;
> * and again at FOSDEM 2006;
> * GNU/Linux Magazine France published a series of 17 articles by Yves
>   Bailly, covering all aspects of the language (to the point where
>   students I talked to thought Ada was "fashionable")
>
> I probably forgot lots of other noteworthy events but you get the idea.
>
> I think that's not too bad for a "dubious or nonexistent future".
>

Thanks.  We're one of the schools mentioned in this depressing
document that uses Ada for CS1 and CS2.  We're still firm believers
that there exist zero better languages for _educating_ computer
scientists.  Fortunately we also have zero need to train enty level
programmers in our CS major, which most schools do.

I have to confess that we have recently changed the last semester of
the CS3 course to Java for a number of reasons, not least of which is
to give students a sense that they may, after lots of hard work, have
earned the knowledge to operate in that environment without mother Ada
to keep them on the straight path.

The Air Force Academy, also mentioned, has, I regret to say, gone over
to the dark side.