Re: an interested business-oriented programmer (Rod Weston)

[Michal Nowak <vinnie@inetia.pl>]

>I am currently surveying the state of programming in the business
>world, deciding where to get involved with OOP.  In the few days that
>I have been evaluating Ada, it seems to have the attributes of a
>language I would like to learn, but I am rather concerned about the
>lack of popular support for it, especially in the business world.  I
>went to my local Barnes and Noble bookstore last night and found not a
>single book on Ada.  I went to my library and found only four books,
>two of which were written before 1987.  And I haven't seen a single
>reference to a business (inventory, sales, etc.) program written in
>Ada.  Could someone offer some encouragement for me?  I don't mind
>being a pioneer, I just want to have some assurance that my efforts
>will not be wasted.
>
>Thanks for your consideration.
>
>Rod Weston

I am a student of computer science at Poznan University of Technology
in Poland. It's my 4th year now. I got to know some programming 
languages here (starting from Pascal, C, through assembly, Lisp, Prolog,
C++, Java and some others). I do not know why, but there was no Ada.
Now, on 8th semester, on facultative subject I had 2 (two) lectures on 
Ada (the rest was MPI, advanced PVM, Java RMI and CORBA). And
it was short introduction, and then it concerned mostly distributed
communication in Ada (gnatdist). The first program I written in Ada was
distributed Hello world. The sceond was assigned project. There is a
producer, dealers and clients. Producer produces three kind of products,
to  storages with limited space. Client generates orders to dealers. Then
dealers can communicate with themselves and transfer products or
generate order to producer. Producer, dealers and clients are on 
separate computers. It took me two days to write this program (or
rather programs). I haven't earlier know anything about Ada. What
was pleasure for me - the program _never_ crushed or thrown an
exception. More - it worked just as I wanted it to work. I didn't need
debugging. For the first time in my life, I had so much pleasure and 
satisfaction of writing a code.
My situation is (I think) a bit worse than yours. There no book on Ada 
available in bookstores right now (but it is said, that some years ago, 
there was a book on Ada, but nobody has seen it).  I couldn't find any 
projects realized in Ada in Poland. I searched the web, but I found info 
about Ada only in two other universities, bo no job or projects. It is not
an interesting perspective. Whatever the situation is, I want to learn
Ada. This is a great language, very well designed.
My advice is: go for it. It is new experience, good experience. Skills
gained in Ada programming will be useful in other projects. Let
description of my project be prove, that Ada is powerful, but nice
language.
BTW - it is nice to know, that there is somebody in similiar situation
like mine :-).

Greetings to all Ada programmers
Mike Nowak