Hello All,

Just got back from OOPSLA last night. Currie's on his own for now. He'll
be there thought Wednesday. I helped on Monday afternoon and Tuesday
afternoon.

I ran into some of the opinions that you've been talking about. I met
several people who were once Ada programmers or who programmed Ada in
college. I met a lot who thought that Ada was for the military only. I
even met someone who thought that the DoD had given up on Ada because
the mandate was gone. Some thought Ada was not object-oriented. I met
someone who was burned by Ada (several years back due to bad compilers,
etc) and would never go back.

One of the things I tried to make sure everyone got was the "Why Ada?"
pamphlet. I was hoping at the very least that it would open their minds
a bit. We had a bunch of flyers for the commercial success stories as
well, which also helped. One person asked about Ada in communications,
and I pulled the mobile communications flyer from the rack. The $10 CD
helped also. I told people its their chance to try Ada at home. We had
several buyers. Telling Java or would-be Java programmers about AdaMagic
also helped. I gave those who didn't buy the CD a flyer about the SIGAda
web site.

Most seemed pleasantly surprised with what we showed them. Bottom line:
the SIGAda booth at OOPSLA _is_ helping a bit to change people's
perception about Ada.

Oh, yeah, I had to sigh when Alan Kay, the keynote speaker, had a slide
with Ada spelled as "ADA".

Gary

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Gary Kephart, Software Engineer  |  Investment Technology Group, Inc
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Disclaimer: these are my opinions, not ITG's.