Re: Commercialization of Ada Technology - Part 3

[djs@actnyc.UUCP (Dave Seward)]

In article <330@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard) writes:
>Judy Bamberger at the Software Engineering Institute raises some
>important questions ...  "why is [the
>introduction of] Ada such a big deal [when compared to the...
>
>One of the larger obstacles to the acceptance of Ada technology
>(anywhere) is that it only solves a limited number of problems,
>specifically military problems.
>
I have heard this before, and not understood it then either. What about Ada
makes it inappropriate for, for example, compilers, assemblers, linkers, other
text processing applications (such as those I use it for). What makes it
inappropriate for a national banking network, such as was done in Finland in
Ada. I can think of problem domains in which is unwieldy or useless, but I
hardly think they constitute the majority of nonmilitary applications.
When the narrow domain view is taken, it is easy to justify the requirement
for a big push for acceptance, but when one sees wide ranging applications,
one is more likely to wonder what the big deal is. Ada for comercial uses
is much more popular in Europe, but then so was Algol. US companies prefered
to stick with COBOL and FORTRAN. A large job done properly in Ada will not
see production of code until late in the game, relative to what many
people are accustomed. This ought to be the case in any language, as the
same benefits would accrue, but the rules of Ada virtually require it.
Many people are unwilling to accept this, and I think it is more a style
of management than the whims of programmers. As Ada is not well suited
to use without the underlying model of Software Engineering, it will
not play in Peoria until the underlying model is accepted. This, in my
opinion, is what the big deal is.

Dave Seward
uucp.actnyc.djs