Re: Desirability of C++

[Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com>]

In article <4F706057FEE2A550.BF5FE19AE279EFCD.A55706B3F9D07043@lp.airnews.net>,
	rlove@antispam.neosoft.com (Robert B. Love ) wrote:

>In <8eclae$afj$1@slb7.atl.mindspring.net> Richard D Riehle wrote:
>> Here is the U.S. it gets pretty silly sometimes.  Last week, yet
>> another senior military officer pronounced in an influential meeting,
>> "Ada is dead."  
>
>Care to name him?  I sometimes write Congresscritters.  No reason why
>I can't write this officer, if I knew where to address the envelope.

Sorry, Robert.  I have gotten myself into more than enough
trouble over the years by naming names.  In fact, it doesn't
matter, in this case that we don't have the actual person's
name.  It is, sad to say, a widespread belief within the military
and, more recently among military contractors.   More important,
such pronouncements are not made maliciously, nor are they intended
to create yet more conflict in the language wars.  Rather, they 
reflect the influence of very bad advice from civilian organizations
with vested interests in other technologies.  

On top of that, the interpretation, by many, of former Assitant 
Secretary of Defense Paige's memo, is that Ada is no longer a DoD 
language.  It is a stupid interpretation and completely wrongheaded, 
but people will read what they want into it.  Notice the plethora
of articles at the time of the publication of that memo that declared
that Ada was "dead."  How can we blame military officers for mistakenly
thinking it is dead when they read that it is in popular magazines
such as Dr. Dobbs and Government Computing News.  

My current group of students was required to take a class in C++
as one of their preparatory courses for the program in which they
are enrolled.  When I ask the question, "Would you want to fly in 
an aiplane that depends on software written in C++?" they almost
unanimously answer, "No."   Meanwhile, contractors and others are
happily building software with C++.  To their credit, those 
contractors are deeply concerned about the quality of their product,
and some have indicated that, the deployed software must be reliable
regardless of what language is used.  

In my opinion, not often witheld, the defect density of software 
written in C++ is very likely to be higher than that written in 
Ada.  Moreover, it is more difficult to locate those defects as
early in the software lifecycle as it is with Ada.  

So when someone from the DoD says, "Ada is dead," and then answers
the question of "What is the alternative?" with "C++,"  I find myself
getting really annoyed at the poor advice these folks are getting.
And that is just the point.  Every senior officer in the military,
every DoD official, every DoD contractor, wants to produce quality
software.  They rely on advice from others to do so.  The advice
they get is from people with heavy investments in selling technology,
and services, mostly for languages other than Ada.  
 
Now that Secretary Paige is no longer in the DoD to champion the cause
of Ada, we need to find some mechanism to alert these senior decision
makers to the need for selecting the appropriate language for high quality
software, particularly in weapons systems. Our approach should not be to 
nag these senior officials but to find some way to raise their level of 
awareness about the dangers of the alternative technologies.  

Anyone who chooses C++ over Ada for a safety-critical DoD software system 
either 1) does not understand C++, 2) does not understand Ada, 3) does 
not understand either, or 4) has an agenda based on criteria other than
the relative merits of the technologies.  

Richard Riehle