HalHart wrote:

>What do we have to do?  Do we have to take out full-page ads with url's
>and names in the major newspapers in the 10 largest cities to get the
>word out to both sides??  What?
                                        -- hh

Yep.

The surprising fact is that although many people in the technical fields
find jobs through networking or other professional methods, many still
base their conceptions of the availability of jobs in a certain field on
the number of newspaper advertisements they see. If they don't see Ada
jobs advertised, the perception is that there is no market for Ada
programmers. Therefore they would be wasting their time even trying to
network for those non-existent postions. So we end up with the employers
not telling (no ads) and the seekers not asking (no market).



Additional thoughts on Marsha's Trade Study:

I would hope that the trade study would include some analysis of the
maintainability of code. One experiment I would like to see is to
take two 20 year old programs that implement similar functions coded in
different languages and ask skilled programmers to update them to add a
specific new feature. We now have 20 year old programs available in a
variety of languages and some of these do perform similar functions.
A company as large as LMC should be able to find two military programs
in their libraries that would fit the bill for this type of experiment.
Basically my point here is that Ada keeps claiming to be better now it
is time to prove it - Especially in light of the DoD decision to remove
the mandate. Ada vendors now have a vested interest in proving the claims
for the language. Trade studies like Marsha's will soon be required by a
lot of Ada's former friends (DoD) and if we want the studies based on
facts then we must be willing to do the investigative work.

Enough said except for the standard disclaimer that all opinions expressed
are the author's and do not represent an official goevernment position.

Dean R. Runzel
Software Engineer
US Army STRICOM
Orlando, FL