Visual Basic kicks Ada ass

Visual Basic kicks Ada ass

[Gregory Aharonian]

   As DISA and the Ada vendors twiddle their thumbs and botch one Ada
opportunity after another, languages like Smalltalk and Visual Basic are
being adopted by corporations for roles that Ada should have won. How long
is the DoD going to tolerate the Ada policy mismanagement at DISA?

   Case in point is a news story from the 3/15/95 issue of Communications
Week titled "A new role for Visual Basic":

	Although many corporate developers would balk at using Visual
	Basic to build large-scale enterprise applications, events at
	a conference last week might change their minds.
	The 2000 attendees of the Visual Basic Insiders Technical
	Summit saw several demonstrations of real time, distributed
	applications already deployed on national and international
	levels.

2000 attendees (most spending their own money) at this summit versus 70
attendees at the Ada insiders Summit (most not spending third own money).
Another one of those 25/1 Ada rejection statistics, not that anyone in the
DoD cares about the truth of Ada acceptance inside and outside the DoD.

	The most telling demonstration of how far Visual Basic has come
	was given by Lee Perryman, deputy director of broadcast services
	at the Associated Press.  He demonstrated a VB application
	that encompasses a computerized broadcast newsroom with 50 TV
	stations nationally, plus the ABC television network.  Perryman
	showed that changes in broadcast programming made in one location
	such as Chicago or New York, are quickly updated in other views
	at other sites with no noticeable delay.

	"We are real time all the time", Perryman said.  "We cannot afford
	to go down, and we do not have time to back up our data.  A change
	made at any site is reflected in all other sites, and our data at
	the various locations must remain in synch."

This is a real hoot, if during the next skirmish the US military gets involved
with like Iraq, where US political and military leaders get their up todate
info from network news feeds like CNN and ABC, that a Visual Basic application
is more responsive than the DoD's Ada systems.

	"The real key is not Visual Basic itself, but in the extensibility
	of Visual Basic to these many third-party add-on utlities" said
	Darryl Petrancuri of Automated Catalog Services.  "Its real true
	that, in this business, you are as good as your third-party tool
	set".

Years ago many of us were screaming for the DoD to reengineer procurement
regulations so that contractors had incentives (capitalist competition being
one of the better incentives) to purchase reusable Ada component libraries.
But the DoD consistently refused to do so, even when its own studies said to,
and the result is that the Ada third-party was and is stillborn, with few
anywhere expressing Mr. Petrancuri's sentiments about Ada.

	Several questions need to be resolved to go from a single-PC
	applications language to an enterprise solutions platform,
	including: How can you keep track of team programming efforts?
	How standardized are the external tool sets used by different
	developers?  How do you maintain distribution and deployment of
	new data and application revisions?  How well does it play in a
	multiuser distributed network environment?  And can it be used
	across the Internet?

While the smug Adaites will point to such concerns to poopoo Visual Basic,
the industry will use people spending their own monies to come up with the
tools to address these problems, a few of which I have no doubt will come
from some of the Ada vendors.

Thanks to DISA mismanagement, apparently with DoD blessing, Ada use inside and
outside the DoD continues to drop in market share percentage.  No wonder the
DoD doesn't want to collect demographic data on programming language use.

Greg Aharonian

Re: Visual Basic (and other products) kick Ada's ass

[Colin James III]

At TOOLS EUROPE '95 (attended at my expense and as a self-described
"Ada refugee"), the same thing was apparent but at a more elegant level:  
Ada was ignored except for an Ada Workshop (which I did not attend so 
I don't know how many showed up) and an Ada academic on a panel about 
multiple inheritance.  

The hoot there was that the academic of NYU/ACT fame attended only because  
two Ada vendors which exhibited (Rational and Thomson -- nee Alsys) split 
the cost of paying the guy's way.  But ironically those two 
vendors demoed **only** C++ tools and environments, with the Ada name just  
embedded in the list of supported languages in their handouts.  

A panel on financial software discussed how Object Pascal, C++, and 
Eiffel had been used successfully in large oo development banking projects 
in, respectively, Societe Generale, Swiss Bank Corp in London, and 
Credit Agricole Lazard Financial Products.

But nothing was done in Ada; NOTHING.  In fact, not one of the papers 
published beforehand in TOOLS 16 (by Prentice-Hall) mentioned Ada.  But 
there were plenty of papers mentioning other languages, such as Eiffel.

If Ada was still a major, leading edge language force in Europe, then 
even the most casual of observers would not have noticed that statistic.

What Greg Aharonian writes about Ada in the US is in fact mirrored 
exactly in Europe, now.

What follows is that the Ada community is simply wasting its time.

Re: Visual Basic kicks Ada ass

[Bob Kitzberger]

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

: 	"We are real time all the time", Perryman said.  "We cannot afford
: 	to go down, and we do not have time to back up our data.  A change
: 	made at any site is reflected in all other sites, and our data at
: 	the various locations must remain in synch."

: This is a real hoot,


I agree it's a hoot.  Let's see, they're using Windows and 
"can't afford to go down"?  

--
Bob Kitzberger	        +1 (916) 274-3075	        rlk@rational.com
Rational Software Corp., 10565 Brunswick Rd. #11, Grass Valley, CA 95945
  "...the solution to the problem is usually to pee on it"  -- Dave Barry