Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?

[gvls1!lonjers@louie.udel.edu (Jim Lonjers)]

It may come as a surprise to many folks that yes, even when people have a
choice, many choose Ada, and it is not limited to the more highly
publicized cases of Boeing (777) and Motorola (the Cellular Telephone
system).

My company sells to many non U.S. DoD customers (FAA in the U.S. and
several foreign customers).  When we have a choice, we pick Ada.  In many
cases, we have to sell our decision to the customers.  One rather
interesting one was to an organization that had passed an "Ada mandate,"
but the folks who actually had to carry out the mandate did not want to be
bothered with it.  We ended up having to convince them that their
organization's mandate was the right decision.

Yes, rational people do pick Ada, even if it takes more work to convince
the customer that it is the right way to do business.

[Just a few words of support for Dave Emery who seems to be under attack
 for his views -- I too have observed the same pro-C militant attitudes.
 Shall I say it?  Yes, it seems to be pretty much out of ignorance.  Most
 of those who are militantly in favor or against any particular thing
 are not all that well versed in the alternatives.

 About the only thing that C has going for it is that it has a large
 trained base of programmers (how well trained, I do not know).  This
 is because most of the schools now teach C as part of the curriculum,
 or when a curriculum does not teach a particular language, C is
 encouraged.  It is also easier to write little C programs than it is to
 write little Ada programs.  However, when it comes to portability, reuse,
 large scale programming of any sort, C really does come up short.  I agree
 with the commentor that it is such social factors that will be the true
 determiner of who comes out the winner in the "language wars."  Lets not
 forget that COBOL and FORTRAN are still winning by a large margin.
 
 It is interesting that C++ has invented an inter-language
 calling mechanism.  Also that the C community is now re-inventing
 tasking (threads), but doing it differently, but not better than,
 Ada.  There is no doubt that C++ was heavily influenced by Ada --
 the C++ langauge developers admit that they were intelligent enough
 to borrow many good things from many sources.]

Jim Lonjers