Stanley Allen <[log in to unmask]> 02/05/98 09:48pm wrote:
>Is there even a way to gauge how many current Ada developers there are
>out there and their salary ranges? I know many Ada developers who
>abandon the language because they don't believe they can make a career
>of it. It takes considerable persuasion on my part to get them to even
>consider that this might not be the case. And these are generally
>people who enjoy the language itself. (Naturally, I make a point of
>telling them about the people who have left my office for 6-figure
>consulting jobs doing commercial Ada development.)
If this is truly a false myth, then somebody has to do a big selling
job, because people out here in industry believe it. I just talked to
someone a week ago who is involved in an Ada project on Solaris that is
moving to a PC environment and doing a study to determine whether they
should switch to C++ or not. He told me that he thinks that Ada is
clearly the best language, but feels they should switch to C++ because
there aren't enough Ada programmers available (they have a bit of a
turnaround).
I said that I didn't understand why anyone would turn down a job just
because the language was Ada, because I learned Ada on the job in a
week. Granted I wasn't great in it right away, but any CS major or
experienced software engineer should be able to learn Ada without too
much trouble, especially if you are familiar with C++, Pascal, even C.
I can understand people thinking that C++ is the way to go, but all I
see there is being open to C++ jobs. Why does that mean saying "no" to
an Ada job? If the *job* is with a good company and the project is a
good one, why should anyone turn that down simply because they would be
programming in Ada, and "as everyone knows, C++ is where it's at!"?????
IMO, this "I can't make a career in Ada" excuse really means "I am
personally prejudiced against Ada because it *makes* me use good
programming practice, aned *that's* no fun. If I *want* to use good
programming practice, *that's* different."
I have been embarrassed for my profession for a couple of years now, and
I have not yet found a reason to change that to pride.
---
James Squire Send my Spam to mailto:[log in to unmask]
MDA^H^H^HBoeing St. Louis http://www.boeing.com
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Hey Novell, is it too much to ask that when I log out of NetWare, it
should ACTUALLY record that I've logged out, so that it doesn't have to
scramble around the house laboriously when I try to log back in, forcing
me to ring the door bell 20 times??????
Opinions expressed here are my own and NOT my company's
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"We are already, as you so quaintly put it, going straight to hell. We
cannot escape what's coming."
-- G'Kar (to Garibaldi), "Comes the Inquisitor"
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