Re: How should DoD further Ada education?

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>1.  What role should DoD play in expanding software engineering education,
>using Ada as the implementation language?

How serious about it do they want to get? How much money do they have to
spend? The high-end solution would be to ensure that each and every junior
college, college, and university in the land had a quality Ada development
environment available, that chairs of software engineering were liberally
sprinkled around the country and heavily endowed, that quality teaching
was encouraged through the liberal use of grant money, and so forth. Since
there isn't enough money to do even a fraction of this, I think the DoD
should concentrate on getting cheap Ada compilers up and running on UNIX
boxes and giving them away to all schools. The GNU front-end Ada idea is
a promising way to accomplish this at relatively low cost. The fear I
have is that the DoD would approach it like another moon-shot and try
to build a Large Government Agency to try to build the be-all end-all
Ada development environment to give to schools, which will not work if
ALS/N is any indicator (it would be far cheaper for the DoD to simply
buy 1,000 Rational Environments and seed the country with them).

>2.  How best should DoD carry out this role?
>	(ie., financial support for faculty, course development, hardware,
>	 software, etc. or more direct course development support)

See above.

>3.  How do we expand the number of Ada-literate people coming out of the
>universities?

See above.

Basically, the answer to getting Ada into academia (and, by
extension, into each year's crop of new graduates) is to look
at what has worked in the past. UNIX was made widely available
to academia, as were C tools. Not at all surprisingly, there
sure are a lot of schools that use UNIX and teach--for better
or worse--their students using C. Hmmmm.

There is, of course, one other issue, and it involves psychology
more than anything else: there is a certain segment of the population
that rejects Ada out-of-hand because of the DoD's involvement. I've
had lots of people react to my telling them I write in Ada with
"Isn't that the Weapons of Mass Destruction language?" like I'm
a baby-killing satanist or something. The point that Ada is
1) actually invented by some clever Frenchmen not involved with
defense work at all, 2) specifically designed for software engineering,
3) being used successfully on a number of COMMERCIAL projects (particularly
in Europe and Japan [1]) doesn't seem to have become general knowledge,
or seems to have been selectively deliberately NOT paid attention to
by those who recoil from Ada because of the "taint" of the DoD.
Sadly, a significant concentration of individuals who react this
way can be found in academic environments (in my naive youth I
thought of institutions of higher learning as enclaves of people
MORE open to new ideas than most...but I was young).

>4.  How do we expand the use of Ada in information systems?

Resolve the SQL binding issues. Make widely known the fact that
STANFINS-R was an overwhelming success of Ada in an MIS application
(there is a clear need to do this--I got a call the other day from
someone IN the DoD who'd never heard of STANFINS).

>5. What can or should DoD do in conjunction with industry to further Ada usage?

Focus on areas in which FORTRAN and COBOL are the dominant players now.
I have noticed that it is actually possible to get a FORTRAN or COBOL
shop to adopt Ada--it is robust, procedural, English-like, comes with
industrial-strength tools, etc. I believe it is easier to get such shops
to transition to Ada than to C++, which is regarded as more of a "weird"
language. Ada is ideal for scientific programming, and with just a little
work could be the upgrade of choice for MIS applications. It also by all
rights should be the de-facto standard for process control, and for
any hard real-time application with life-critical implications.

I wouldn't waste ten seconds trying to get C shops to migrate to Ada:
they're going to adopt C++, and that's that. (Sigh.)

[1] It is true, you know, that Ada is making inroads into the commercial
    sector in both Europe and Japan. People in those areas seem to be
    less emotional about the DoD aspects, and more interested in the
    technical and managerial arguments for Ada. Indeed, I have had
    several people who work for companies in those areas tell me that
    they regard Ada as a strategic advantage. It occurs to me that we
    may be in the midst of yet another failure on the part of the United
    States to capitalize on something it invented, sort of like VCRs,
    Demming's approach to quality, fuzzy logic, motorcycles, cameras,
    and memory chips...
-- 
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