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Thu, 31 Jul 2003 06:40:44 -0700
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>On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:53:44 -0400 Roger Racine <[log in to unmask]> wrote.
>Last week there was a meeting of The Open Group's Real-Time & Embedded
>Systems Forum, which works on software standards.  A lot of the work is in
>the area of safety-critical software, and is focusing on Java as a
>language.  The interesting thing from the Ada perspective is that many of
>the people at the forum seemed (at least from the comments I listened to)
>to be unhappy that they were not able to use Ada.  Ada is now banned by
>some parts of the DoD.

That is truly sad.  I really find it offensive that my customer, whether it
be the DoD or not, is trying to tell me how to do my job.  If I am being
hired to do a job, let me decide how best to do the job.  I certainly
wouldn't go to a restuarant for a meal and place myself in the kitchen
telling the cook how to cook, I'd likely get my hand chopped off! :-)

>
>I talked to a couple of people about this, and was told that companies that
>wanted to use Ada were getting rejected by potential employees specifically
>because of the use of Ada.  I asked if that is still occurring, or if it
>was a few years ago when there were many fewer available people, but no one
>knew the answer.  They basically said it was too late.

If someone doesn't want to use Ada in their profession than they should go
elsewhere as far as I am concerned.  I want to use Ada and have always
wanted to use Ada since 1983.  I have been blessed with Ada jobs all during
this time.

>There were a couple people who actually did not like Ada, but it was more
>that they had had bad experiences with specific compilers.

I tell these kind of people to give GNAT a try.  I think very highly of that
compiler!

>By the way, Ben Brosgol gave a quite good talk on lessons learned using Ada
>for safety-critical applications and did point out that Ada is still alive
>and being used on new projects.  The point I got out of the talk was "The
>Ada community has solved the safety-critical problems.  Why waste time
>fixing the same problems for Java?"  I think others might have gotten a
>different point.  :(

I sure would like to know that I still have chances to work on Ada projects
in the future.  I am thinking about changing jobs now and don't really want
to work a C/C++ or Java project.

Chris Sparks

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