Re: employment with ada

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

DPH wrote:

> At the conference, one of the 40 minute talks was given by Lockheed
> Martin on the Fate of Ada in the Joint Strike Fighter project.
>
> Starting out by saying that they are all personally Ada zealots, and
> strongly believe the langauge to be superior to anything else around,
> the company was forced, by business realities, to do their safety
> critical software in the Joint Strike Fighter in a safety critical
> subset of C.

Reading through the list of reasons given for abanonding Ada in JSF,
I cannot agree with their decision.   There are plenty of opportunities
for Ada training outside the university environment, some of it of
better quality than they would get in college classes.

The LMCO programmers are, as with any other kind of employee,
expected to work with the tools and resources appropriate to the
job.   Looking for another job is secondary to that.

The focus of the JSF effort is to produce the best quality software
possible for the aircraft.   Instead, they cobble together a set of
restrictions for C, restrictions we can be assured will be ignored
over the lifetime of the project.

Some Ada compiler publishers have vanished.   Many of those
were simply acquired by Ada compiler publishers that still exist.  Some
should have gone out of business a long time ago.   A few are hanging
on by a slim margin, and this decision does not help.  The hardware
vendor compilers (HP, Tandem, etc.) actually used Alsys (now
Aonix) compilers with their own label so the list of compilers is
smaller, but the original developers are still around.

Though the LMCO presenters may consider themselves "zealots,"
and though they think this was a "boneheaded" business decision,
if the reasons they gave are the real reasons, it was a wrong
decision.   It will cost them more in the long run,  they will be
fighting with quality issues in C they would not encounter with
Ada, and the programmers they are trying to retain with C will
leave just as quickly if not more so than if they were using Ada.

It is interesting  to me that, as I see DoD contractors making the error
of moving away from Ada toward inferior technologies, non-DoD
organizations are discovering its benefits (some of them are not
in the U.S.) and enjoying success with it.   This is one more example
of the old phrase, "grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory."

Richard Riehle