Re: The actual quote from the Post AAS article

[sampson@nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson)]

In article <1993Mar12.161548.6286@evb.com> pole@evb.com (Tom Pole) writes:
-In article <1no3fbINN3h7@umbc4.umbc.edu> berman@umbc.edu (Mike Berman) writes:
->
->There have been a few posts referring to the 8 March Washington Post
->article, "Out-of-Control Contract - How IBM's Effort to Modernize FAA's
->Air Traffic Monitoring System Went Awry". 
->
->Out of a several hundred word (~60 column inch) article, Ada is mentioned
->directly in one paragraph only:
->
->	"Adding a further level of complexity was the
->	government's insistence that the entire project be done using a
->	new computer language called Ada. The federal government was
->	attempting to control a muddle of incompatible software
->	languages by standardizing, but many programmers had to learn
->	the exotic language from scratch."
->
->"... new ..."? "... exotic ..."?!?
-
-... other good stuff deleted.
-
->
->Any attempt to assert, based on the information in this article, that Ada
->is the sole reason for failure, or even a major contributing factor, is
->absurd. This project would have failed using any implementation
->language.
->
-
-The point is that these problems were known to be the major culprits
-in the "software crises" and Ada was supposed to solve them.

     I've lost track of who edited whom, but what is missing in the above
is a large number of claims about non-programming problems, among them
one that mid-level IBM managers had been circumventing established proce-
dures for vetting software.  I don't know of any language that can solve
that problem.  I certainly don't think Ada proponents have every claimed
it for Ada.

				Charlie