Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I know you basically agree with me when I say we have to go off and 
create the Ada market for ourselves. I understand your frustration with 
the program managers, the politics, the professors, etc. We can't change 
them, but we *can* change ourselves.

Program managers are driven by factors beyond just technical superiority 
of a given language. There's all sorts of economics involved and other 
sorts of practical issues. They're never going to see Ada as a viable 
choice unless there is some element of popularity in the bigger world. 
So we should quit complaining about them and get Ada used in a bigger 
way where we *do* have control.

The politics isn't going to change either. Its controlled by perceptions 
that are historical and at best we can only influence. But if we start 
making things in Ada and selling them successfully, a lot of those 
perceptions will start to change.

Colleges/professors have their own batch of reasons for why they 
emphasize one language over another. But they are driven by market 
forces too. If nobody is hiring their grads because nobody wants Ada 
programmers and all they teach is Ada, then they quickly start to lose 
student body. There must be jobs out there or Ada is just some academic 
curiosity that is maybe worth some mention in a programming language 
survey course. So we need to *create* those jobs. That can only happen 
if we create products that use Ada.

We've got to quit whining about this and actually *do* something that 
might increase the popularity of Ada. If not, it will slowly wither away 
and we'll have nobody to blame but ourselves. (Or maybe we can *try* to 
blame it all on a few boneheaded managers. :-)

MDC


Richard Riehle wrote:
> 
> Programming language selection, like politicians, is made on the basis of
> slogans, buzzwords, and half-truths.   Almost no one in the DoD contractor
> community is making programming language selection based on a full
> and informed basis.   The choice of "experienced" Java programmers
> over experienced domain experts, is one of those kinds of decisions.
> 
> Experienced software project managers realize that language skills are
> more easily taught than domain knowledge.   Of course, we need a
> good mix of languages experts and domain experts for any project.
> More important than experience in some specific programming
> language is experience developing software in a variety of languages.
> 
> For safety-critical software, or for software where a high level of
> dependability is essential, Ada is still the best decision.   However,
> when finding inexpensive university-trained programmers is the goal,
> Java is the right choice.   Of course, those Java-trained programmers
> are not likely to understand much about real-time controls, the deeper
> concerns of concurrency, the techniques for achieving efficient low-level
> constructs, scheduling algorithms, or most of the other stuff we routinely
> teach our Ada programmers, but no matter;  they can write web pages,
> create little GUI programs, and target the JVM.
> 
> In one of my classes this Quarter, Programming Paradigms, we are focusing
> our attention on two languages:  C++ and Ada.  The students have already
> had two Quarters of Java before entering this class.   We also introduce
> them to several other languages such Eiffel, Lisp, Prolog, and my favorite,
> Smalltalk.  As they become more and more informed about Ada, after
> studying C++ and a lot of Java, many tell me how much they enjoy Ada,
> and ask why it isn't used more.   Yes, they continue to use Java, because
> they know a lot more of it, and they can make those little GUI's (although
> they also write MS-Windows programs in Ada in this class), and the
> other professors prefer them to us C++.   But they are learning that there
> are choices, and Ada is a good choice for certain classes of problems.
> 
> One reason Ada is not more widely accepted is that it has been so badly
> presented so often.  True, C++ is usually taught badly as well.   But Ada
> suffers from the many mistakes we have made over the past twenty
> years in the way we have taught it.   Professors, most of them I know,
> want nothing to do with Ada.  It is not as new and interesting to them as
> Java.  Moreover, they can get papers published more easily in Java than
> they can in Ada.   I have been told not to submit a paper if my examples
> are in Ada.  I am advised to use Java instead.  To which I reply, "No
> thanks.
> I really don't have a compelling need to publish."
> 
> C# is an interesting language.  It seems to have learned a lot from Ada, as
> well
> as from Java.   There are some things I dislike about it.   There is even
> one
> feature I simply find annoying:  the misuse of the term "delegation."  In
> OOP,
> delegation has long had one well-understood meaning, and C# has corrupted
> that meaning to be the equivalent of a pointer to function.  Sheeeeeeesh!
> 
> Richard Riehle
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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