Re: Anyone else actually like Ada?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!seas.gwu.edu!mfeld man@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1993Jul23.122525.26017@hellgate.utah.edu> matwood%peruvian.cs.utah.
edu@cs.utah.edu (Mark Atwood) writes:

[some stuff deleted]
>
>Working with C/C++ at school, I got so sick of chasing pointers, debugging at
>runtime, and having interface mismatches, grrr!!  The long and short of it is,
>I fell in love with Ada.  The development environments suck, it's pricy, and
>I'm always having to justify myself, but I don't care.  Now, even when I'm jus
t
>doing design work, or implementing in C, I design and code it up in Ada first,
>and use it as a design language.
>
>I hate the politics and hypocracy in the DoD world, and am offended by the
>people I meet who think that all they need to know about it is that "the
>DoD designed it, you know what THAT means (roll eyes)."  But I love the
>language that it so readable and comprehensable, and expressive enough to
>say damn near everything that everyone else needs OS calls, nonstandard
>extensions, or knowledge of the compiler/runtime/hardware to hack together.
>
>Am I so strange?
>
Nope. You've actually got a lot of company out here. It's hard to tell
from reading this newsgroup, though, which seems too frequently to 
degenerate into political gripe sessions. I think many of the ones who 
are really getting the job done with Ada are staying away from the
newsgroup - they have better things to do.

For all the complaining about who's _not_ doing Ada, it is telling that
Ada is often being used where software _really_ has to work. A few examples:

- avionics software for ALL (I'm pretty sure) new-generation civil airliners,
  including the Russians';

- civil air traffic control systems in ALL countries that are currently 
  revamping their systems;

- the new French high-speed rail lines and the Channel Tunnel.

None of these projects were subject to a mandate, at least not a US
DoD mandate.  I think they simply discovered what you and I did, and
acted accordingly. And this is just Ada83 stuff. Wait 'til 9X...

Flames to /dev/null, please.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"We just changed our CONFIG.SYS, then pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL. It was easy."
-- Alexandre Giglavyi, director Lyceum of Information Technologies, Moscow.
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