Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

[Stanley Allen]

For the benefit of those of us who didn't get a chance to
go to Tri-Ada this year, can some who did post their 
impressions of it?  How was the attendance?  The trade show?
The entertainment?  The presentations?  The panels?

--
Stanley Allen
mailto:s_allen@hso.link.com
home:sallen@ghg.net

Re: Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

[Bob Livingston]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997 19:48:30 -0600, Stanley Allen <sallen@ghgcorp.com>
wrote:

>For the benefit of those of us who didn't get a chance to
>go to Tri-Ada this year, can some who did post their 
>impressions of it?

Nice view of the arch...

>  How was the attendance?

Down again - 330 this year.

> The trade show?

Smaller. Lots of consolidation. Closed early. SGI was not there, so at
least you could talk without having to shout over the video games...

> The entertainment?

I left early to watch NYPD Blue. (sorry Robert!)

> The presentations?

Mixed bag - some great, some boring, most in-between

> The panels?

As usual, very good!

This conference definitely had a different feel than those of 5 years
ago. Much less "we got a mandate" arrogance ('cause we don't...). I
was dissapointed by the attendance, but have a feeling that it has
bottomed out or is at least approaching bottom. There was a very high
percentage of foreign attendees, almost as if the foreign interest has
remained stable while the U.S. interest declined.

Next year is in DC, and the name is changing to SIG-Ada '98

An interesting side note: St. Louis was *paralyzed* by a "record"
snowfall of TWO inches on Thursday afternoon. To be fair, it was ice
on the bridges into IL that really slowed things down. I had planned
on staying until Friday anyway, but my colleague had to leave
Thursday. So I took her to the airport (15 minute trip) and it took me
THREE HOURS to get back downtown!

We live in Vermont and she was booked on a flight through Pittsburgh
to Burlington (scheduled arrival 11:00 PM -- Thursday).

Her flight was 3 hours late out of St. Louis, then got diverted to
Harrisburgh where she had to spend the night. The next morning, the
only flight east went to Philly. From Philly, all the Burlington
flights were either canceled or full, and the only thing she could get
was a flight to Montreal. From there, she had to rent a car and drive
2 hours to Burlington where her car was parked at the airport.

I came home Friday and picked up my car (parked in the same lot) an
hour after she did!

Bob

Re: Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

[Gordon J Dodrill]

Stanley Allen wrote:

> For the benefit of those of us who didn't get a chance to
> go to Tri-Ada this year, can some who did post their
> impressions of it?  How was the attendance?  The trade show?
> The entertainment?  The presentations?  The panels?

This was my first Tri-Ada since 1989 (in Pittsburgh), and I 
have not been using Ada on a regular basis, so I am probably
not the typical attendee.  My impressions follow.

When I picked up my registration materials Saturday evening,
I asked how many were registered and the lady said there were
about 325.  I never heard an official announcement of the final
total.

I picked up a fairly wide spread theme of mixing Ada with other
languages in any given project.  There was a lot of talk of
interfaces to other languages, with C++ and Java being the
languages mentioned the most.  Compiling Ada to Java bytecodes
was mentioned several times.

Our department is involved in High Integrity software development
and I was pleased to find lots of discussion and solutions to the
problem of building High Integrity software.  John Barnes gave
a four hour tutorial on High Integrity Ada, much of which is in
his new book titled, appropriately enough, "High Integrity Ada".

The return on investment was definitely better than most software
conferences I have attended.

Gordon Dodrill
Sandia National Laboratories - Albuquerque, New Mexico

Re: Impressions of Tri-Ada 97

[Matthew Heaney]

In article <3472456E.65CE@ghgcorp.com>, Stanley Allen <sallen@ghgcorp.com>
wrote:

>For the benefit of those of us who didn't get a chance to
>go to Tri-Ada this year, can some who did post their 
>impressions of it?  How was the attendance?  The trade show?
>The entertainment?  The presentations?  The panels?

My favorite thing was Tuck's High Integrity Object-Oriented Programming
speech.  Earlier in the week Joyce Tokar had said that "object-oriented
programming makes the safely-critical guys really nervous," but I didn't
understand what she meant by that.  But Tuck explained it by saying that
code gets tested with a certain method call - and that by subclassing, you
can change the behavior of already-tested code (because the method call
dispatches to a different subprogram).  That's why Ada binds statically by
default - and gives the caller the choice whether to bind dynamically or
not.

Overall, I was happy with the conference, though I was disappointed by the
small turnout.  It saddens me that languages like C++ get so much fanfare,
when Ada 95 is clearly a superior language for systems programming.

I also got to hang out with Bryce Bardin a lot, and he gave me much insight
into the language by telling me about the Ada 9X design process.  All
fascinating stuff; I actually think it would make a good book.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Heaney
Software Development Consultant
<mailto:matthew_heaney@acm.org>
(818) 985-1271