Re: Legislative Mandate for Ada

[bwb@sei.cmu.edu (Bruce Benson)]

In article <2449@sparko.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes

>"Sec. 8092. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after June 1, 1991,
> where cost-effective, all Department of Defense software shall be written
> in the programming language Ada, in the absence of a special exemption
> by an official designated by the Secretary of Defense."

"shall be written" - does this mean new software or does it mean we have
to convert the hundreds of millions of lines of Cobol to Ada?  We may be
able to do it blindly with a Cobol to Ada translationr and it would
probably be fairly cheap (as things go) to do so.  I can see the metric
the bean counters are going to use to check compliance:

                          Total KLOC - Ada KLOC
                          ---------------------
                              Total KLOC

If the percentage doesn't approach 100 fast enough then they will mandate
mindless translations.

>"Ada Programming Language - The Department of Defense developed Ada to
>reduce the cost of development and support of software systems written in
>the hundreds of languages used by the DoD through the early 1980's.
>Beside the training economies of scale arising from a common language,
>Ada enables software cost reduction in several other ways: (1) its
>constructs have been chosen to be building blocks for disciplined
>software engineering; (2) its internal checking inhibits errors in
>large systems lying beyond the feasibility of manual checking; and
>(3) its separation of software module interfaces from their
>implementations facilitates and encourages reuse of already-built
>and tested program parts. While each of these advantages is important,
>Ada's encouragement of software engineering is fundamental. Software
<on and on on the benefits of Ada>

If I've learned nothing else while working at the SEI, it's that most
software engineering claims are purely back-of-the-envelope
no-connection-to-reality sheer speculation, or in other words:
never been validated on the scale being discussed.  If the government
would simply recognize that their programs are just national experiments, 
and conducted them as such, then we could gain some benefits out of all
the mandated "good ideas" by using government as one big test bed.  This way 
we could justify the high cost of government by reminding everyone that
inefficiency and failure are valid and acceptable results when testing an
hypothesis.


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