Re: Current status of Ada?

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> On 22 Sie, 02:15, Jeffrey Creem <j...@thecreems.com> wrote:
> 
>> And it is fair the say that the survey under-reports as many people
>> working DoD related projects
> [...]
> 
> It is interesting, but the problem is really in what kind of
> information this survey is expected to provide. For the sake of mental
> experiment, let's assume that 50% of Ada projects are classified. At
> first sight, the survey under-reports by 50%. But if the survey is
> supposed to provide some insight on how strong and vibrant is the Ada
> community (for example, the requester wants to be sure that she will
> not be left alone with her problems), then the survey is 100% exact,
> because it comes from those contributions that actually form that
> vibrant and responsive part of the community. Anybody else is
> effectively out of the community.
> 
> It is more or less analogous to the report that says that we might
> have fuel problems within the next N years. Does it under-reports the
> reality considering the fact that there are whole *planets* in our
> solar system that are composed almost entirely of methane or hydrogen?
> They might be somewhere there to look at, but are effectively
> unreachable in the same N-years timeframe, and so are completely
> useless in this context.
> 
> What I want to say is that every time a similar question is raised,
> the Ada community tries to "pump up" or visually inflate itself by
> mentioning some nebulous DoD or otherwise classified activity. This is
> cheating - the Ada community is effectively as strong as the number of
> people that are able and willing to talk about their experiences.
> Everything that is outside of this is just as useful as hydrogen on
> Jupiter.
> 
> --
> Maciej Sobczak
> http://www.msobczak.com/
> 

If the purpose of the study is what you say then I totally agree. If the 
purpose of the study is to see how many projects/Lines of code are being 
done in Ada to determine if there is enough activity to support the 
various vendors so that 'the community' is not left in the cold by lack 
of vendor support, then I would assert that these surveys fail.

Note the projects in question don't even need to be classified. Public 
release of almost any information can cause problems in big organizations.