Hi, Everyone,
There are many opportunities to promote Ada, and part of what I've been
observing is the number of missed opportunities, such as Tech Ed. However,
there are some opportunities that are being made. For example:
1. I mention Ada from time to time to my Visual Basic students, showing
them that while one language has a place, others do as well
2. I mentioned Ada from time to time to my sponsors at Microsoft (who
are also supporting the Ada and Software Engineering CDROM)
3. Ada is obviously a part of the Ada and Software Engineering CDROM,
which
is the only source of Ada information in the popular bookstores and
computer stores I visited this weekend; of course, the CDROM is
duplicated
in the two ASE Library websites, so the material is freely available;
I've authored/mentored the development of 40 of the 380 assets in the
ASE Library, including the Generic Web-based Reuse Library, which is an
Ada95 family of programs that write the web pages that comprise the
library front-end
4. I'm one of the presenters at the Southeast Quality Conference of the
American Society of Quality, where I'm in the same session as Mark
Paulk
of the SEI (who will be talking about the CMM); the conference is in
October (right before SIGAda 2000) and is expected to draw around 5,000
people, including Vice Presidents of Delta Airlines and Ford (who will
also be speaking)
5. I'm an Ada resource within Lockheed Martin (the company for which I
work,
which also happens to be the largest defense contractor in the world),
and
I teach Ada courses there
6. I participate in the Ada Awareness Initiative, and have for several
years,
volunteering my time to go to conferences and support the Ada booth
7. I have created an ASE Library Community on the Microsoft Network and
requested
that the Programming Languages area have Ada added as a topic (this has
not
been done yet)
8. I give presentations on Ada resources at other conference venues, most
notably
the Lockheed Martin Software Reuse Symposium (I spoke the last two
years)
Part of what I'm doing now with the recent flood of email is deciding
whether to
continue these efforts or direct my activities elsewhere. As another data
point on
the pulse of Ada, what other Ada-oriented promotions are taking place?
Rick
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Richard Conn, Principal Investigator
Reuse Tapestry
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