"Ada Bashing" article in Federal Computer Week

[eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard)]

The July 11, 1988 issue of Federal Computer Week has an editorial
written by Fred Reed ("Ada: A View From the Field", page 19) which
supposedly presents both the pros and cons of Ada. The following
quotes are representative:

"What follows is one man's opinion, but it is an informed opinion --
he programs in Ada as well as C and other -- so I thought it was worth
passing along. We'll call him Bob because, Ada being a fairly sacred
cow, he didn't want to be named."

"... Ada has been called everybody's favorite 17 programming
languages." 

"Fewer programming errors. Among other features, Bob explained, Ada
has what are called strong typing and range checking. Strong typing
means that the programmer is forced to tell the computer the nature of
each piece of information he uses. This allows the machine to be sure
incompatible kinds of information are not mixed."

"Ada, said Bob, is well suited to being understood and maintained by
many programmers who will work on a large program over its lifetime.
This is why it saves money, he said."

"However, he noted, these strength also result in weaknesses. For
example, the programmer has to write extra code to do the strong
typing and range checking, and this, among other things, makes Ada
code slow to write."

"Further, because the program constantly has to check ranges and data
types as it runs, Ada produces much slower programs than some other
languages.

"An Ada program typically runs a tenth as fast as the same program in
C," said Bob. "I think we are seeing the bureaucratic attitude at its
ultimate. Ada is a prudent approa

ch to software. It is defintely
suboptimal in performance -- slow, bulky, verbose and slow to write.
But it is reliable and easy to work with after it is written. It is
safe. These are qualities prized by bureaucrats. DoD chose reliability
over performance."

				-- Ed Berard
				   (301) 695-6960