> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen D. B. Wolthusen [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 9:42 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: What's Ada's life expectancy?
>
>
[snip]
> [...]
> > Meanwhile, we Ada advocates try to find evidence to rebut the
> > old Catch-22: Ada is not being taught much anymore because
> > the faculty and students don't see the jobs out there, and the
> > employers walk away from Ada because they don't see the graduates
> > who are educated to use it.
>

The approach here is to have more S/W Engineering classes and make better
S/W Engineers?  I think this is not effective.

In all organizations I have worked most software is written, spec'ed, and
architected by non-software engineers.  They have rarely had more than one
into. class in programming as an undergraduate and carry on with masters and
PhDs in other engineering areas.  C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, and Matlab are
spoken here.  Ada is being dumped.

Any effort to improving software has got to be taught to ALL engineers - not
just the few S/W Engineers.  It is the Aerospace PhD who gets to chose
hardware and software policies, tools, and even procedures and
architectures.  S/W engineers do not get hired to do these things - they get
hired to write code.

That is the real world.

[snip]

William Dale
Just my opinion, not that of Lockheed Martin
mailto:[log in to unmask]