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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: Ada
Date: 1999/12/23
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References: <38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com> <83tohh$q2s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
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Date: 1999-12-23T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <83tohh$q2s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  reason67@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com>,
>   Brijesh <brijesh.malkan@gecm.com> wrote:
> > I am fairly new to Ada programming and have a rather trivial
question
> I
> > was hoping the group could help answer.
> >
> > I understand Ada is a very powerful language but is not used
much
> > outside the defence industry, I was woderign if this is a
correct
> > assumption and if so why is this the case - and if not where
else is
> it
> > used.
>
> In the USA around 1% of comercial software was written in Ada.
So, your
> assumption is correct.


I wonder where that figure of 1% comes from. If true, it means
that Ada is widely used, since this is 1% of an absolutely HUGE
market (1% is much higher than you think, once you have
subtracted out the really popular languages like COBOL and
Visual Basic, the latter accounting for the lion's share of
all software development).

In fact I suspect the figure is below 1%, but again, we are
talking percentages of a huge market, so even a sliver of this
can be highly significant. After all what percentage of the
over all automobile market does Ferrari have or Rolls Royce,
yet we still consider these technologies significant :-)

Certainly we all know lots of examples of successful commercial
use of Ada.

There seems to be a general tendency to write off technologies
that do not dominate the market. I can't tell you how many
people I meet who think OS/2 is dead, when in fact it is being
very successful in many contexts (and has exceeded sales
expectations every quarter for the last 5 or 6 quarters). Sure
it does not have the market share of Windows, but this again is
a huge market, and OS/2 has a significant share.

A similar situation exists with Ada. Of course it is not
numerically as successful as C++ for example, but that really
does not mean much. If you need the most reliable and best
technology around, you do not take a poll to see what is the
most commonly used technology!


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