License to Steal

[rdriehle@nps.navy.mil ("Riehle, Richard")]

I was recounting the history of Ada for one of my classes at Naval
Postgraduate School today.   At one point, I came to fact that the
original Ada policy had been abrogated.   Then I pointed out that,
since the abrogation of that policy, I see people using all kinds of
new languages.   I predicted that over the next few years, we will
be right back to the situation that triggered the need for Ada in 
the first place:  a proliferation of programming languages that only
a few people know.  This is already happening with so-called UDA's,
"user defined applications" written in everything from Visual Basic
to Perl.  UDA's are popping up all over the place in the DoD.  Once
the person who created the UDA is transferred, no one else knows 
what to do with it or how to maintain it.   Often is unmaintainable
because it is in some special version of some special language that
is not portable to the next [version of] an operating system upgrade.

As I was describing this situation, one of my students said, paraphrasing,
"It sounds like cancelling the Ada mandate became a license to steal."

Richard Riehle
rdriehle@nps.navy.mil
richard@adaworks.com
http://www.adaworks.com





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