From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,583275b6950bf4e6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-02-27 19:40:56 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!snoopy.risq.qc.ca!newsfeed.news2me.com!newsfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!harp.news.atl.earthlink.net!not-for-mail From: Richard Riehle Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 19:51:14 -0800 Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering Message-ID: <3E5EDCB1.C841AFDD@adaworks.com> References: Reply-To: richard@adaworks.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 3f.bb.68.d9 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Server-Date: 28 Feb 2003 03:40:54 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:34704 Date: 2003-02-28T03:40:54+00:00 List-Id: Preben Randhol wrote: > Robert C. Leif wrote: > > DoD could have made Ada if they had only forbidden its use by the public. > > Universities would then have been motivated to teach it. > > Irony, right? The mismangement of the Ada initiative began early. When the DoD insisted that everyone had to use Ada even before there were good compilers available, they opened the door for abuse of their own policies. The mandate itself encouraged compiler publishers and others to gouge their principle client with prices so outrageous that commercial users could not even consider Ada. The quality of compilers in the early days was unpredictable and some were quite horrid. The quality of Ada education was not very good. One Navy admiral told me that they hired a "highly qualified" person to teach Ada at the U.S. Naval Academy, and all she could do is confuse the students and bring them to believe Ada was simply a large complex language no one could use for anything practical. This scenario occurred over and over in many venues. The waiver policy was a joke. One Navy site was discovered to have a safe full of waiver requests that had never been processed and the contractors simply went forward using other languages anyway. Many of the computer hardware vendors had what became known as checkbox compilers. No one was supposed to use them. For example, Tandem's Ada compiler was not intended for anyone to actually use, only to satisfy the checkbox that said, "Validated Ada?" They never even tried to interface Ada to any of their essential development environments. This also happened over and over. Project managers often made no effort to understand how developing in Ada was different from any other language. To them, it was just another programming language. That resulted in a lot of AdaTran, and a lot of really dumb code being produced. When the project got in trouble, these same incompetent managers looked around for somewhere to cast the blame and blamed Ada. Their own stupidity seemed strangely compatible with the stupidity of the people they worked for. The list of reasons goes on. Even if Ada had been the greatest technology ever invented, the DoD's management would still have ensured that no one would ever discover it. Good people, doing real projects, did find the benefits of Ada and they went ahead and built excellent software in spite of their own management policies and DoD incompetence. Ada is in something of a decline. That is unfortunate. However, new people are discovering it and recognizing its expressive power and its virtues over competing technologies. If it is to make a comeback, it will have to be because those who choose to use it are able to create excellent software and the results of their work is discovered by others. This is possible because Ada, in its current form, is still a better technology for software development than the competing technologies, the popularity of those competing technologies notwithstanding. Richard Riehle