The Future of Ada

[endrizzi@sctc.com (Michael Endrizzi )]

I walked into my current job an Ada addict. The people I work with
are all pretty much C/Unix hacks, so I thought I had the world
at my beckon. I watched and laughed in horror as they passed
untyped pointers, randomly recompiled modules because they
"knew" which ones were out of date, used pointer arithmetic
because C bit-fields did not align properly, etc, etc.

Reality hit.

I won't mention the name of the vendor in this column, but we
purchased a moderately priced Unix Ada environment.  Word had
it that this package was "OK" but not great.  No such luck.
I am living in a nightmare of internal compiler errors and 
inconsistent data base errors.

This is why the survival of Ada is at stake:

	1)Control
	2)Cost
	3)Complexity

1)Control: Programmers and our associated egos like to be in control 
of our destinys. On paper, Ada is a powerful tool that automates
many of the manual checks (recompilation, type checking) that
other languages lack. By using this tool, we give up control.
Big egos don't like to give up control. And when that tool
doesn't work right, it's like being in a speeding car with
not steering wheel driving in the mountains.

C/Unix on the other hand is a hackers tool. If this don't
work right...well we all know how easy it is to flip a
few bits here and there to make it work.

2)Cost: Quality Ada environments are expensive and resource hogs.
You can't just sit at home and hack into the night on your
Mac/PC. You must have your $100,000 Rational with 200 Gigs
of storage parked in your basement to get a true Ada high.
I know on our system, I must balance elegance with "will
the damn thing even compile, fit on our disks, crowd out
other users, etc".

C/Unix on the other hand is basically free. GCC is probably
one of the highest quality C products and it is free. Unix
comes standard on some systems.  Compile times, storage
requirements are reasonable in a multi-user environment.

3)Complexity: On paper Ada is addictive, elegant,  true
solution to multi-person life-cycle software engineering.
In reality, I know of only 2 products that are usable:

	1) Rational
	2) DEC

(there might be others, but these are the ones most
talked about and I am familiar with).  Ada merges several
technologies --multi-user database, parallel processing,
software engineering, compilers, user interfaces, etc.
The only way to support the integration of these technologies
is to have a platform that allows them to talk to one another.
The platform must either be customized (Rational) or of
high quality (DEC/VMS).  Unix was/is/will always be a disaster
This then goes back to the cost issue.  

Also, very few vendors are able to master these technologies.
Either they  are too small to afford it or the egos are so
damn huge in the individual fields that they can't bring the
team together to build a quality product.


I am done rambling. I learned my lesson. Ada taught me many
great concepts and but also the realities of life.

		au revoir Ada, :-(   (sniffle,sniffle)

			Dreez


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               Michael J. Endrizzi
	Secure Computing Technology Corp.
	   1210 W. County Road E #100
	      Arden Hills, Mn. 55112
	        endrizzi@sctc.com
	          (612) 482-7425
	
*Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are not of my employer
             but of the American people.
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