The actual quote from the Post AAS article

[berman@umbc.edu (Mike Berman)]

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 ..."?!?

The majority of the article talks of enormous requirements documentation,
high reliability requirements ("The FAA wanted extreme reliability in
the network. 'The system has to be up and available for all but three
seconds a year,' [IBM Federal Systems chairman] Ebker said."),
continually changing requirements, lack of testing, management
problems ("Middle-level IBM managers began on their own
authority to circumvent formal practices by which software is vetted
within the company before being allowed into use, Ebker said. 'The
problem is key individuals in key slots who didn't do their jobs'), and
lack of adeequate software tools.

The article is pretty straightforward in placing "blame" on all factors
taken in toto, not representing IBM's failures as failure due to the use
of Ada. In fact, it appears that the article's author knows little about
the language (or software engineering, or even programming, for that matter).
Let's face it, the "exotic" features of the language are the same or
less exotic than the features found in OOP languages.

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.


-- 
Mike Berman
University of Maryland, Baltimore County	Fastrak Training, Inc.
berman@umbc.edu					(301)924-0050