Re: Answering an Ada/COBOL Question

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <80sfrb$1o0$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net>,
  Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> I suppose Silicon Valley is a little different from the rest
> of the world.  C and C++ are lingua franca of computing in
> this neighborhood.

Yes, but Silicon Valley is hardly the place to find typical
fiscal programming going on. Back in Realia COBOL days, we
had thousands of customers, I don't think one of them came
from the valley :-)

I bet that visual basic is used more than you think, and that
goes for the valley as well.

> So much energy is being devoted to ideas that simply cloak
> the deeper problems that one can only wonder how we will
> survive any future conflict.  Granted, there are a few
> intelligent people still making good decisions.  The downturn
> started with Bill Perry's notion of COTS for everything,
> extended itself into the folly of adopting, "industry best
> practices," and culminated in  a decision to abandon Ada.
> Yes, I know.  That is not how the  decision was worded.
> But that is how it is being interpreted.

by some, but not by others. And after all the mandate was
ignored by some, and not by others. We see our Ada market
growing, including a number of brand new projects starting
out using Ada.

> This idiotic notion of "industry best practices" illustrates
> that DoD officials have no clue of just how bad industry
> software is. The DoD has, for a long time, been building much
> better software than that in the commercial sector.

You will probably get flamed for that, but I happen to agree.
I attended a Y2K seminar in the DoD, and very much the feeling
that was projected was that DoD was in much worse shape, and
had far worse problems. My reaction was that the situation was
certainly no worse than the commercial sector, and in some
ways better (it is less usual in DoD environments for instance
to have entirely lost the sources to your software).

> Ada has certainly evolved as a beter option for most
> applications than COBOL.

That's true, but I am afraid this potential is so far
unrealized. The COBOL sector in general regards C and C++
as hacker languages unsuitable for fiscal programming, But
they simply don't know about Ada as an alternative.



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