Re: Gauntlet thrown: OOPSLA program

[cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!wupost!c s.uiuc.edu!johnson@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Ralph Johnson)]

srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes:

>If you call up all of the people on the program, and ask them where there
>funding comes from, you will find DARPA funding C++/Smalltalk/Lisp
>stuff ten to one over Ada in OOPSLA sponsorship.  Thanks to such funding,
>Ada-whatever is dead in the OOPSLA world.

>The foundations and battles for OOP languages were fought years ago,
>during the 1908's.  C++ and Smalltalk, thanks in parts to such large
>Ada contractors like IBM, captured all of the high ground, leaving the
>swamps for Ada.  Too many legacy decisions are being made now, and have
>been made, for Ada to succeed outside the Mandated world short of a
>masterful and strategic marketing manuever by the Mandated World.

The Ada community and the OOPSLA community do not overlap much.  I don't
think it has much to do with DARPA funding.  Moreover, I do not think
the battles for OOP languages are anywhere near over.  The programming
world is constantly being revolutionized, and there is no reason to
think this will stop any time soon.

I am program chair for OOPSLA'93.  There are many groups that share some of
the interests of OOPSLA but do not attend OOPSLA.  I think it would be
good to interact more with them.  We targeted three such groups this
year, one of which is the Ada community.  Having OOPSLA in Washington
made Ada an attractive option, but the Ada community is a natural
target anyway.  A lot of the work on object-oriented design and analysis
methods came out of the Ada community.  They are interested in software
reuse like we are.  The largest Ada systems are much larger than the
largest C++ systems.  I'm not convinced that they have attacked reuse
properly, but I think that there is a lot we will have to talk about.

Ada is not an object-oriented language, but it looks like Ada 9X will be.
OOPSLA is about object-oriented programming, so it is natural that most
of the OOPSLA community has not been using Ada.  But lots of people try
to use Ada in an object-oriented style, so I have been a little surprised
that there is as little interaction between the two communities as there
has been.  This probably due to the fact that the Ada community already
has its own conferences, so they are not as willing to go to a conference
where only some of the material is relevant to them.  Nevertheless, I
think that there is a lot to be gained from cross-fertilization.

-Ralph Johnson