From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_20,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 1 Sep 93 02:57:02 GMT From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman) Subject: Re: Air Force using C coding standards to assess Ada projects Message-ID: <1993Sep1.025702.9330@seas.gwu.edu> List-Id: In article srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes: > I recently received the following piece of information that is so >outrageous that I am almost tempted to put the Air Force at the top of my >"we-aren't-interested-in-Ada" list, surpassing even ARPA's hostility >to the language. > [GREAT story deleted] Let me add my USAF horror story. Couple of years ago I was an expert witness in a contract protest. Small Ada simulator, 10k lines, maybe $5 million to produce. Details unimportant. My client had proposed 10 LOC per day, end-to-end, based on their years of doing similar programs in Fortran. It was explained to them that they lost the award because their 10 LOC bid was OUTRAGEOUSLY optimistic, given that an (unpublished, uncited) USAF guideline called for 3 LOC for systems of this kind. It was a fixed-price award, so any productivity hits would have been taken by the contractor anyway. USAF claimed my client OBVIOUSLY did not understand the complexity of the application (yeah, right - they had 25 years' experience doing simulators in Fortran, successfully, at 10 LOC per day). The case was heard by an administrative law judge. The lawyer who hired me suggested that we try to assess how much the technical guy from USAF knew. NOT the general who made the decision, just the techie who whispered in his ear. The techie was a kid about 3 years out of a BSEE degree, with a little Fortran experience. So we gave him a quick test: we wrote a 10-line program - find the max of a few numbers read from the console, as I recall - in Ada, Fortran, and C, and asked the guy if he could identify the languages. He got Fortran right; he identified _both_ Ada and C as "Adatran." This was in a deposition a week before the hearing. So we asked him that question when he was on the stand. Needless to say, he blew it again. I don't expect generals to know low-level technical details. I _do_ expect captains (I think he was a captain) in technical positions, where they are giving technical advice to generals, to know _something._ Asked on the stand whether he had effectively decided this award, i.e. whether the general just took his advice, he answered yes; so did the general. Asked on the stand where he got the 3 LOC number, he could cite no written source; he said "someone at Wright-Patterson said it was a useful rule of thumb." On such bases, apparently, are contract awards decided in our services. This has nothing to do with Ada, but it has everything to do with Ada. The ignorance is BEYOND BELIEF. Any more horror stories out there? Oh, remember the one I told a while ago about the Navy officer, project manager, who said he was inclined to go with C++ because "somebody told me Ada could not do abstraction and information hiding"? Sheesh. Mike Feldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------