Re: Ada policy enforcement

[Ken Garlington <garlingtonke@lfwc.lockheed.com>]

Richard Pitre wrote:
> 
> If Ada were *manifestly* better then there would be no need to enforce it.

"If [insert your favorite law here] were *manifestly* better then there would
be no need to enforce it."

That's a trite (but true) argument to such statements. How about a different
one? Ada is _not_ *manifestly* better than other languages. (As far as I know,
there is no language that is *manifestly* better than all the others. If there
were, then there'd only be one language being used by everyone in the world!)

Ada's big payoff, at least in the original rationale for Ada, was that it
would be a better choice 5-30 _years_ from the initial development of the system.
That rationale is not obvious (manifest) to a developer who is only worried
about getting it out the door and getting paid. Thus, depending upon the
"manifest destiny" of any language selected for total life-cycle advantages
would be very suspect, in my mind.

> The federal government should learn from the DoD
> experience and establish standards and certification mechanisms in areas
> of software development affecting public safety.
> No direct enforcement, just support for real education,
> standards of performance, and certification.

Presumably, these standards and certification mechanisms would not
be required? :)

Actually, I do agree with a lot of what you say. A carrot approach would be
better than a stick. My conversations with OASD folks imply that they would
like to see this, as well. However, how do you give someone a meaningful
carrot twenty years after delivery? Is that something that fits well into the
five years (at most) business planning cycle, or for that matter the one
year defense budget cycle? I frankly don't know. However, if you can't
come up with a satisfactory carrot, and you take away the stick, then you've
probably decided (whether you wish to or not) that the original goal isn't
worth pursuing.