From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,6b52d7d76a636925,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1995-03-14 11:15:59 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!world!srctran From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Visual Basic kicks Ada ass Message-ID: Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 19:07:28 GMT Date: 1995-03-14T19:07:28+00:00 List-Id: 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