Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

["E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net>]

Ken Garlington wrote:

> While looking at the SIGAda 2000 web site,
> I notice that the role of Ada in defense applications is minimized
> (even after the explicit requirements in this area were dropped).
> For example, the list of "recent" successful Ada-based systems
> includes only commercial projects, some five years old,
> although one of the most recent Ada success stories occurred
> just a few days ago (October 24).  I also notice that
> an interview last year with Tucker Taft included the statement,
> "These days we're focused mostly on commercial success stories..."
> I can understand wanting to promote commercial applications,
> but isn't this going a little overboard?

Apparently, national defense, and the U.S. Navy in particular,
has finally turned toward Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)
solutions after encouraging a commercial computer industry
for the past 50 years.

It is possible to implement reliable applications
in other programming languages through diligence,
discipline and exhaustive testing.  It just costs more.
One can only assume that the commercial developer
weighed these costs against all of the other costs
relevant to application program development when
they decided which programming language(s) to use.

The problem for the military
is to test and evaluate all of these applications
and select the best value.

If application program source codes are transferred
to the military, they must find and/or train programmers
to modify and maintain that source code.
It is easier to find and train C and C++ programmers
than it is to find and train Ada programmers today
so there is a strong incentive to prefer C or C++ over Ada.

A lot can be done to incorporate safety and reliability
into C and C++ compilers and class libraries
but these languages are inherently unsafe
and there is very little that can be done about it
without changing the languages themselves.