Here at Ball Aerospace, all commercial birds are going to be in Ada
indefinitely.  So far: GFO, QuikSCAT, MTI, Quickbird, soon to be
launched ICESat, and just won NPP (NPOESS Preparatory Project).  We
don't have trouble finding software engineers but we're in Boulder, CO
which may help.

Darren Davenport
Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp
Boulder, CO

        -----Original Message-----
From:   Michael Feldman [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Monday, July 29, 2002 12:23 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: What's Ada's life expectancy?

        Said Stephe,
>
> Other languages have well outlasted their predicted lifetimes; look at

> COBOL. Ada Core Technologies is making money and growing; no reason to

> think that will change.
>
> --
> -- Stephe
>
I think Ed Colbert was, in his original post, referring to new starts.
Obviously Ada will be around in "legacy" (sub-)systems for a long time
to come.

        Yes, we discovered in the Y2K mess that there was a lot of COBOL
out
there. But those Y2K COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement
(and paid very well for a short time) to work on it. That doesn't say
much about whether COBOL is really in active use, or whether there
are any new starts to speak of. (I don't know whether there are -
do you, Stephe?)

        OK, back to Ada. Is anyone aware of new starts that weren't
committed
to years ago? As you probably know, I try to keep abreast of this,
and report it in
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html
<http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html> .
I haven't seen anything in quite a while; OTOH I haven't done much
active research on it recently.

        I have not had a tip on a substantive addition to this list in
two
years or so, maybe even longer. (The latest revision date is 6/22/02,
but that was only to fix a couple of dead links.)

        Anyone have anything to offer?

        Cheers,

        Mike Feldman