Re: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit addressing and OOP

[softeng3456@netscape.net (soft-eng)]

Tom Welsh <news@tom-welsh.co.uk> wrote in message news:<WLKGbLATlNq+EwiQ@nildram.co.uk>...
> In article <9fa75d42.0304240503.54dbc5d1@posting.google.com>, soft-eng
> <softeng3456@netscape.net> writes
> >
> >If Ada projects had actually succeeded in producing good quality
> >software, it would have been everywhere today.
> >
> Although I don't think this argument holds water, it raises an issue
> which I think is very important. Perhaps the most important issue for
> software development today.
> 
> Observation suggests that good software products do not necessarily
> become popular; and the methods and processes adopted in successful
> software projects do not necessarily get widely imitated. 

Where do you get this?  People in the industry adopt what
they see succeeding.  It's a feedback loop -- if a pilot
C project in a company succeeds wildly, everybody in the company
wants to do C projects.  If this happens in many companies,
C programmer demand goes up, salaries go up, more students
learn C, then other managers have to use C because all
college graduates know C...

Of course, the feedback loop could go much faster and
start fully grown in terms of rewards, if you have
billions of dollars backing up some language.
But Ada is proof that there has to be more than billions
of dollars.  There have to be _results_.

> Why is this? Anecdotally, we have the old joke about how any project
> failure is followed by steps including (but not limited to):
> 
> * Punishment of the innocent;
> * Promotion of the guilty;
> * Scattering of the project team to the four winds;
> 
> and (most significantly for our purposes)
> 
> * Burying of the evidence.
> 
> These steps are calculated to block dissemination of knowledge about
> what works well, as opposed to what fails consistently. Feedback is
> stifled, and learning prevented.
> 
> How about successful projects? Well, for a start these are in a small
> minority - partly because of the syndrome described above. Moreover,
> some of the most strikingly successful projects are considered strategic
> (whether in government or business) and are therefore kept secret. Once
> again, the feedback loops are blocked and learning does not take place
> on any significant scale.

So you are saying the Ada projects that succeeded were secret,
and the ones that were not secret did not succeed?

I suppose then commercial interests were right in leaving
Ada.  Unless they were going to keep their projects secret,
it would not have succeeded!!

It's probably nothing to do with Ada -- the secret projects
would have succeeded in any language because too much
money was going to be thrown at them in secret.  Believe
it or not, before Ada the DoD had many successful projects
in assembly language.  That doesn't mean assembly language
is the best tool.

Of course, perhaps a non-Ada language could have cut the project
costs and time to a quarter, but since the project was a secret,
there wasn't anybody around to point it out, was there?