Ada scandal makes front page of Wash. Post business section

[news@fedfil.UUCP (news)]

 
The Ada programming language made the front page of the business section
of the Washington Post on March 8 this week.  The article was titled
"Out-of Control Contract"...  a fitting title.  It concerns the gigantic
IBM contract with FAA to ensure the safety of air travellers by writing
the next generation of air-traffic control software in Ada.  Describing
the overall situation as FUBAR would be a kindness to the parties
involved.
 
Some quotes from the article:
 
    "In an unusual and painful admission, IBM concedes it short-circuited
    its own testing procedures as it tried to meet deadlines.  The result
    was a series of bugs in  preliminary versions of the computer network
    -- a system in which an error could cause a deadly plane crash."
 
Of course, this is a real-world consideration.  None of these
contractors wants to look bad or get shit-canned and have to go job
hunting.  Make their lives hard enough and impossible enough (by
insisting that they use an impossible programming language, for
instance), and you have short-circuited technical tests, and that means:
 
 
 
WHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....   SPLOWIE!!!!!!!
 
    "...many programmers had to learn the new language from scratch."
 
Another real-world consequence of swimming against the tide.  C and C++
programmers are not hard to find, but IBM, the world's largest computer
company, apparently couldn't find Ada programmers.  That means that  the
only thing standing between you and another aircraft moving at 600 mph
will soon be a first-time-ever Ada programmer:
 
 
WHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....   SPLOWIE!!!!!!!
 
 
   [..description of design change requirements, midstream] "Over two
   years, there were close to 600 such changes."
 
Another real world consideration, as opposed to Ada, which is part and
parcel of an entire deluded system of thought, whereby software
development is viewed as an engineering discipline much like building a
skyscraper.  This means total design from the highest level of
abstraction down to low-level PDLs and that, when code is written for
the lowest level PDLs, the project is finished and you move on to the
next project.  The ludicrous assumption being made is that all
parameters of a large task can be known perfectly before a line of code
is ever written.  Smalltalk, C, C++, Pascal, and other modern languages
can all be used for fast prototyping;  The 600 midstream changes would
present no particular nightmare.  Ada, of all programming languages,
appears to be the one which has the most difficult time with prototyping
and, in fact, appears to be adapted, in theory at least, only to a
rather tiny class of problems for which all parameters can be known in
advance.  For anything else, including airplanes:
 
WHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....   SPLOWIE!!!!!!!
 
 
   "Another reason for the delay was IBM's lack of adequate software
   tools..."
 
Whoa!  For $5 billion dollars, the worlld's largest computer company
couldn't buy programming tools?????  I assume here that they mean such
things as compilers, linkers, editors, debugging tools, profilers...
all of the sorts of things I just order from the Programmers' Connection
for $200 or $300 whenever I need them.  You say you can't find these
sorts of things for Ada after 13 years, even for 5B dollars (my understanding
is that a billion is a thousand million)????
 
That's going to put a lot of projects behind schedule, and that's going
to cause a lot of technical tests to be falsified:
 
WHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....   SPLOWIE!!!!!!!
 
 
To the people responsible for Ada who might be reading this, I would
recommend sepuku.  To anybody else, I would recommend the purchase of
stock in steamship lines and railroads.
 
 
 
 
 
 
-- 
Ted Holden
HTE