Re: Creating markets (long)

[dodger@ukelele.gcr.com (Roger Labbe)]

As a former student who was directly influenced both by 
educational compiler discounts and later a grad student who
took courses with Michael Feldman, I'd like to support his
argument with one example.

As a student undergrad between 84-88, I was able to buy 
a borland Pascal and a borland C compiler for around $35.
Although C was not explicitly taught at our college (Clarkson U.)
a lot of my classmates (and myself) learned C and subsequently
got employment as C programmers. I tried to learn Ada at the
time but the only compiler on campus was a VERY slow compiler
on a unix machine that took 10 minutes to compile a hello
world program (no exageration). Needless to say I never learned
Ada.

In grad school I was exposed to Ada by Mike Feldman. Incidentally,
his lectures sound a lot like his posts! Anyway, after being
exposed to some decent Ada compilers and doing a parallel 
processing project for a Seminar w/ Feldman, I quit my
current job (doing C work) and got a job doing real time Ada work.

So I agree with him, at least for my case, that
1) exposure to languages in college does translate to jobs and
acceptance in the workplace. While I have not yet had the
responibility/opportunity to select a language to develop
a project, that will come in time.

2) educational discounts do influence language choices. I know
a lot of people who picked up a cheap C compiler in school and
ended up working in C after graduation. I don't know anyone
who has picked up a $500 Ada compiler on a whim and then gotten
a job developing Ada.

I don't blame the world for going to C/C++. If it wasn't for
going to GW I would have never given Ada another thought. I
certainly wouldn't be picking up a $500+ compiler to play with
at home. Most people I meet who don't know Ada have mostly
negative connotations of it: too big, too clumsy, who need types
anyway, too slow, designed by a city, etc. These people won't
be choosing Ada for new projects. Certainly the people I know
who graduated from Clarkson and who have no Ada experience have
no plans to learn or use the language.

Finally, I'm giving a lot of thought of moving to C++ for
my next job. I don't want to program in this language, but
I do want some job security. I live in DC and most of the
jobs in the paper each weekend are for C/C++, not Ada. 
The people from my current job who went to other employers
did get Ada jobs, but they are all working on DoD projects
for defense contractors, and they all went (except one) to
the same 2-3 companies. Meanwhile the people I know in C are
getting calls by headhunters regularly for C/C++ jobs.
I don't think that an Ada market is just going to "happen"
because Ada is better.

Roger