Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Rakesh says

<<I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
looking at it more from the point of view of new projects.

I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are:

(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.

(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value.

(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
find people to maintain the code in the long run.
>>


Many of our big customers starting new projects today, or in the near
future are certainly expecting Ada to be around for a long time, and
in particular are expecting GNAT support to be available for a long
time (they look ahead at *least* ten years), and I cannot speak for
the other vendors, but we are an all-Ada company that is not hesitant
to put Ada into our company name, and we expect to be around for a long time!

I am a little puzzled by (2), hard to find = high market value. But perhaps
what you should be looking for anyway is *good* programmers. Good programmers
should be easily able to adjust to Ada, and quickly get to the point of being
able to take advantage of it. An interesting illustration of this was the
Airfields project, the first fielded system in Ada 95, which was largely
written by people with no experience in Ada (I believe some of them were
in fact COBOL programmers). Despite the fact they were new to the language
and were using a quite preliminary version of GNAT, this project was a great
success.

As to (3), whether your code is maintainable or not depends on whether it
is maintainable code. As you note, you know the advantages of Ada, and one
of the big advantages is precisely that both the language and the culture
of programmers using the language encourage the production of maintainable 
code. An unmaintainable program in a familiar language is not easier to
maintain than a maintainable program in almost any language.

I don't think you need to worry about having Ada programmers around to
maintain your code in ten years. If you are trying to look ahead ten
years to see what will be the popular language-du-jour in the year 2007,
I think that is an idle excercise. I doubt it will be any of Java, C++
or Ada, but that really does not matter. There will certainly be 
competent programmers around ten years from now who can maintain well
written Ada code.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies