License to Steal

License to Steal

["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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Re: License to Steal

[Ted Dennison]

In article <F5AD48747FC0324EB21B2B2BD27D5E8698B4EB@Saipan>, Riehle, Richard
says...
>
>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
..
>As I was describing this situation, one of my students said, paraphrasing,
>"It sounds like cancelling the Ada mandate became a license to steal."


In all fairness, my impression is that the mandate was widely ignored when it
was in effect (thown down and danced upon would be a better description), and
that today's proliferation of little scripting languages (Perl, Python, TCL,
VisualBasic, JavaScript, Guile, Ruby, etc.) owe practialy nothing to DoD
support. But whatever the causes, I'll grant you that the symmetry is
interesting.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: License to Steal

[Kent Paul Dolan]

There's a point to all this, though it is fairly far
along.

Richard said:

RDR> I was recounting the history of Ada for one of my
RDR> classes at Naval Postgraduate School today.

I was across town from you interviewing at your Fleet
Numerical annex a handful of weeks ago, this
discussion recalls that and my earlier stint there.

RDR> At one point, I came to fact that the original
RDR> Ada policy had been abrogated.

That's a nice way of expressing it.

Another way is to say that the separate military
services succeeded in a flagrant and determined
violation of direct orders from their Secretary,
turning heel dragging into the next best thing to
armed insurrection, and _so_ much more civilized.

I got fired from my contractor's job at Fleet seven
years ago for suggesting _around_ the chain of command
that perhaps a little attention to enforcing the Ada
mandate, say at my desktop, to reduce the current
chaos, would be in order.

I understand that the captain who ordered my dismissal
was pretty much frothing at the time that all his ways
of weaseling around the Ada mandate had been exposed
from under the rock where they dwelt.

Sigh.

RDR> Then I pointed out that, since the abrogation of
RDR> that policy, I see people using all kinds of new
RDR> languages.

Before, during, despite, and after, that is correct.

RDR> I predicted that over the next few years, we will
RDR> be right back to the situation that triggered the
RDR> need for Ada in the first place:  a proliferation
RDR> of programming languages that only a few people
RDR> know.

You are there already.  Go over to Fleet and check out
"Fortran 95", which they are using because it is the
latest and shiniest new thing despite admissions to me
during the interview process that no one there has a
clue how to write more than Fortran 77 in it.

RDR> This is already happening with so-called UDA's,
RDR> "user defined applications" written in everything
RDR> from Visual Basic to Perl.

Nice to know that open rebellion now has an acronym.

RDR> UDA's are popping up all over the place in the
RDR> DoD.

Nothing has changed.  My last job at Fleet, I was
handed an application suite written in 12 different
programming languages, and, it being among the
missing, added Ada 83 to the mix on my own.  Oh, in
1992 - 1994.

RDR> Once the person who created the UDA is
RDR> transferred, no one else knows what to do with it
RDR> or how to maintain it.

However, that is not the fault of the person leaving,
nor of the choice of some "little language".

RDR> Often is unmaintainable because it is in some
RDR> special version of some special language that is
RDR> not portable to the next [version of] an
RDR> operating system upgrade.

The term "open source software" hasn't been heard
within the Armed Services then?  [Rhetorical question,
Richard, really, I'm still angry from 1994.]

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

No, it became a license to commit rebellion within the
US Armed Services by means short of force of arms.

That will not be forgotten when the next occasion
arises.

Were I the rest of the world foolishly depending on
the US to suppress enemies at home and abroad, losing
Ada, and with her the fiction that the US military is
firmly under the control of the US civilian
government, would not make me sleep better at night.

Ted replied:

TED> In all fairness, my impression is that the
TED> mandate was widely ignored when it was in effect
TED> (th[r]own down and danced upon would be a better
TED> description), and that today's proliferation of
TED> little scripting languages (Perl, Python, TCL,
TED> VisualBasic, JavaScript, Guile, Ruby, etc.) owe
TED> practialy nothing to DoD support.

True stuff.

There are, literally, thousands (less than five, more
than two, probably) of programming languages, a small
but significant portion of CS graduates worldwide
create one as a thesis project, for example.

I might have written one or two myself, but I had the
good grace to throw them away when I was done with
them.

The software industry being more pragmatic than most
realize, sometimes it is the best languages that
survive, sometimes really niche languages arise and
thrive.

I interviewed at a power controller manufacturer (for
stuff like electric cars, golf carts, and on down) and
was rather astounded to find that they had created
their own, in house, compiled programming language,
whose primitive concepts included bits appropriate to
power control closed feedback loops, this in an
enterprise so conservative they still had a company
pension plan.

One of the lessons to be learned there is that the
proliferation of programming languages is not likely
to end soon, so fighting it may not be a profitable
approach.

Another, more obscure one, is that maybe DoD ought to
get in on the game, and more like the controller
company and less like the Ada effort.

    I cannot envision a programming language whose
    primitive constructs are battlefield command and
    control, strategy and tactics, but I suspect
    someone can, and to a Forth programmer, something
    like OFtEotL ("outflank the enemy on the left")
    would be a perfectly natural next dictionary word
    to define, while to an OOPer, that kind of thing
    would dispatch dynamically based on a type of
    engagement tag.  <tiny grin>

A very interesting thesis project for one of your grad
students, Richard, would be to study what it is that
makes a programming language able to grab mindshare
despite being essentially a hacker's toy like C++,
TCL, Perl, or Python, to name ones familiar to me,
while for conceptually adequate other programming
languages, like Ada, even offering to force them down
the programmer's throats at gunpoint fails.

One well known and fairly major clue might be that
Larry Wall is a linguist by training.  Does he know
something the Ada team should have considered about
how the user wants to _think of_ a language?

Another major clue is that John Ousterhout is an
engineer by training.  Does he know something about
how the user wants to _use_ a language that the Ada
folks might have considered?

Of course, over time, the more mindshare a language
has, the more pressure / contributions it has to
improve, so eventually lots of these hacker languages
have gotten hoary and respectible.

TED> But whatever the causes, I'll grant you that the
TED> symmetry is interesting.

More than that, worth a lot of sincere introspection
and planning, both for DoD and for the software
industry as a global entity, this lest each get
blindsided yet again.

The DoD found it could not thrive (and so far as I
know, probably still does not) as a balkanized set of
programmers knowing one language very well and not
talking to the next encampment because that one knows
another language well, but not the same one.

Can it thrive under a still different model than
either "one programming language fits all" or "welcome
to Babel"?

I've been having an extensive offline discussion with
Brian Harvey at Berkeley, developer and maintainer of
ucblogo, a version of the Logo programming language
starring in a sibling newsgroup of this one,
comp.lang.logo.

I was pushing for more "first class programming
language" quality for even a programming language
targeted at kids, he was telling me why it won't ever
happen.

He asked me why I'd bothered to learn many dozen
programming languages over a long career.  Surely the
half dozen languages he named should suffice any sane
person?

Well, no, because as in the job at Fleet, where six of
the languages I had to use were unfamiliar to me even
by name, as an itinerent worker bee programmer, I
don't get the chance to choose which languages my
enterprise uses (usually), I get to use what they
have.

Check current online job listings for "competent
programmer, any language" and see how far you get
finding a job (actually, send me the listing, I'm
looking).

* So, one way out of the UDA morass is simply to train
  programmers to learn new languages quickly.

This lets you find a programmer and let him or her
learn the language by fixing the application written
in that language.

However, ike Ada as a Procrustean bed, that one size
solution also does not suit all, not all programmers
with something of value to contribute are wired that
way, so there are additional measures that need taking
for those workers.

And in general, here are other things that need adding
to finding a path out of the UDA mess before it is
(much worse of) one.

* Make sure that open source tools with source
  licenses are always highly ranked at the RFP level,
  for a couple of reasons.

Open source tools can, with incredible pain, be
upgraded by the customer.

Open source programming tools (at least popular ones)
probably inherently have more knowledgable potential
employees out there who can do such an upgrade, or
upgrade the application program, for that matter, than
do the closed source kinds of tools that only a vendor
could love.

* Attempt to choose tools with simple mental models,
  to assure ease of programmer training.

Follow, for example, the Modula-2 model, _not_ the Ada
model.

Follow the APL model, not the Fortran 95 model, of how
to talk about a multi-dimensional slice of a
right-ragged matrix, to get away from religious issues
probably not capable of rational discussion here.

If someone gets called a language lawyer, or needs to
be called as a language lawyer, in a discussion of how
to make something work, then you flunked.  however
good the intentions of the language designers, they've
built something that won't grab mindshare.

Brian and I in our discussion repeatedly dipped into
the issue of "scope" of an identifier.  This is
instant MEGO (my eyes glaze over) material for the
casual programmer.  Don't tell me about your problems,
language designer, just make it work, and not like
that.

If it is complex to do something, and your user has to
know about that complexity, you flunk again.

* Take into account from the beginning that
  enterprises outlast their staff, and make sure that
  the "Jill gets run over by a truck" plan is in place
  when a UDA begins, not some after-thought, and make
  that part of the check off list for beginning a UDA,
  before Jill writes a line of code.

* Make programmers as interested as managers in having
  the contingency plan in place.

Nobody gets promoted with a dangling project with "run
over by a truck" exposure.

Nobody gets bonuses, ditto.

Nobody gets a project accepted as "completed within
budget and time constraints", ditto.

Nobody gets rid of maintenance responsibility for a
project, ditto.

One nice side effect of all this is that something
like Ada that makes sure you and your potential
replacement can do a turnover quickly becomes a lot
more attractive.

  Gee, I only have to use this one language and all my
  turnovers will be easy?  Why don't I program in it
  from up front?

* Make the managers as invested as the programmers in
  having a contingency plan in place.

No project gets accepted as complete by higher
management until it is backed up offsite, both in
having people to maintain it, resources to run it,
data to drive it, all in place in case terrorists /
nature sap this site.

No manager gets promoted, bonuses, milestone
checkoffs, etc., ditto.

* The same scam works with obvious variations for
  vendors, interaction with other Armed services, etc.

All would work toward commonality of tools instead of
proliferation of tools.

What the Ada effort ignored was something an old FIPS
publication called "Organizational Preparedness for
Change" might have covered.

People protect fiefdoms, savagely, so those must be
disassembled, craftily, not by fiat from above.

The problem with the Ada mandate is that the services
protected their fiefdoms, and showed no higher
organizational level of discipline at all, just the
outward show of some.

This is human nature, and was ignored in the planning
phases for Ada.

Putting some higher level military service discipline
back in place would probably help a lot, wherever the
next attempt to untie this knot heads.

Think of it as an interesting exercise to undergo for
a proof of concept that it can be done at all.


Cheers!

xanthian.
--
Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com>

http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/resume.html

Yeah, right.


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Re: License to Steal

[David Starner]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> wrote:
> Nothing has changed.  My last job at Fleet, I was
> handed an application suite written in 12 different
> programming languages, and, it being among the
> missing, added Ada 83 to the mix on my own.  Oh, in
> 1992 - 1994.

12 full programming languages, or are you counting stuff like
make and autoconf?
 
> * Attempt to choose tools with simple mental models,
>   to assure ease of programmer training.
> 
> Follow, for example, the Modula-2 model, _not_ the Ada
> model.
[...] 
> If someone gets called a language lawyer, or needs to
> be called as a language lawyer, in a discussion of how
> to make something work, then you flunked.  however
> good the intentions of the language designers, they've
> built something that won't grab mindshare.

Won't grab mindshare? Why do you say that? If you compare the
mindshare of Modula-2 to Ada, I think you'll find that Modula-2 is
almost dead, whereas Ada is one of the common 'minor' languages. I
can find as many free Algol-60 compilers as I can Modula-2
compilers, and I've never seen a library or program for or in
Modula-2 appear in Freshmeat or Debian (two major open source
repositories.) 

I haven't looked at Modula-2, but I've looked at (unextended,
Wirthian) Pascal and Oberon, two of Wirth's other languages. The
reason I don't use either of them is because I find the missing
features to be too annoying to deal with. Generics, enumerations,
bitwise operations, non-OO programming, etc. Ada provides me with
all the tools I need to get almost any job done that you'd call on
an Algol-class language to solve, usually in a way that I'm
comfortable working with. That's important to me, and considering 
the rush to C++ and Perl (other languages providing a full set of
tools for their fields at the cost of simplicty), I'd say that other
programmers find it important too.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg

Re: License to Steal

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote
>A very interesting thesis project for one of your grad
>students, Richard, would be to study what it is that
>makes a programming language able to grab mindshare
>despite being essentially a hacker's toy like C++,
>TCL, Perl, or Python, to name ones familiar to me,
>while for conceptually adequate other programming
>languages, like Ada, even offering to force them down
>the programmer's throats at gunpoint fails.

TCL is failing these days. Cameron Laird recently in his column lamented
that TCL books had stopped selling. Probably means that perl and python can
do the job now.

TCL was popular/tolerated because of TK. Once the more usable (compared to
TCL) programming languages got something usable, TCL had no useful life
anymore and is being discarded. It will not be missed.

>One well known and fairly major clue might be that
>Larry Wall is a linguist by training.  Does he know
>something the Ada team should have considered about
>how the user wants to _think of_ a language?

I would not be surprised if you are right. I think he made some interesting
constructs in perl. E.g. I really like "unless" because it allows me to
specify exactly what I want to express, when I use it.

Greetings,

Re: License to Steal

[Jeffrey Carter]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> 
> A very interesting thesis project for one of your grad
> students, Richard, would be to study what it is that
> makes a programming language able to grab mindshare
> despite being essentially a hacker's toy like C++,
> TCL, Perl, or Python, to name ones familiar to me,
> while for conceptually adequate other programming
> languages, like Ada, even offering to force them down
> the programmer's throats at gunpoint fails.

This is fairly obvious. Anyone can learn to program. I call such people
"coders". In my experience, only 2% of coders are capable of becoming
software engineers. (I don't mean only 2% have been trained as software
engineers; I mean, no matter how much training and experience they get,
only 2% of coders will become software engineers. This has something to
do with how people's brains are wired; only weirdoes can be software
engineers. Normal people can only be coders.) Ada is a software
engineer's language. Ada's features to support software engineering make
no sense to coders. They just get in the way. On the other hand, in my
experience at least 90% of software engineers who know Ada like Ada; its
features reflect the way they think.

The problem is not languages, it's who we allow to create software.
There's no easy way to determine if someone is a coder or part of that
2%. If we could restrict professional software development to software
engineers, Ada would be much more popular.

Re: License to Steal

[Marin David Condic]

I had always thought that The Ada Mandate approach was flawed because it was
based on threats (non-credible ones at that.) I suggested at the time that
all the angst over the mandate was going on that having tried threats, maybe
it was time to go the other direction and try bribes. I don't think that the
Powers-That-Be could grasp the concept - perhaps because it is rather
Capitalistic instead of Bureaucratic.

Suppose that someone high up the totem poll were to say: "Here, Mr.
Programmanager (Or Colonel Programofficer) I have in this cookie jar
$100,000.00 genuine U.S. Dollars with non-consecutive serial numbers. If one
year from right (look at watch).......now! you're project is being
programmed in Ada with no material exceptions, then I will empty this cookie
jar into your briefcase and you can go buy yourself a boat or a Lamborghini
or *anything* your greedy little heart desires." How long do you think it
would take for that Program Officer or Program Manager to get their project
moved into Ada? Do you think there would have been a flurry of waivers being
begged for? Or would they more likely have found religion? Do you suppose
that Colonel Programofficer would likely start saying to his contractors:
"Get your programs into Ada or get another customer!" Would Mr.
Programmanager have told his reluctant junior managers and senior
programmers "Start using Ada or start writing your resume!"

Businesses have been tying executive compensation to measurable objectives
for some time now and for the most part it works. In general, bribery is
going to be far more motivational than threats. (Better for The Prince to be
loved than feared? :-)

BTW, If I were Mr. Programmanager, I'd have found some bonus money for the
junior managers and senior programmers if the objective was met, before I'd
have threatened staff changes. But I've seen managers say to recalcitrant
staff "Find religion or find another job" (why do Software Metrics come to
mind? :-) and have people comply. If I can't have your heart, at least I can
have your compliance.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com> wrote in message
news:200104240531.WAA01552@well.com...
>
> The problem with the Ada mandate is that the services
> protected their fiefdoms, and showed no higher
> organizational level of discipline at all, just the
> outward show of some.
>
> This is human nature, and was ignored in the planning
> phases for Ada.
>
> Putting some higher level military service discipline
> back in place would probably help a lot, wherever the
> next attempt to untie this knot heads.

Re: License to Steal

[Stephen J. Bevan]

"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> writes:
> >One well known and fairly major clue might be that
> >Larry Wall is a linguist by training.  Does he know
> >something the Ada team should have considered about
> >how the user wants to _think of_ a language?
> 
> I would not be surprised if you are right. I think he made some interesting
> constructs in perl. E.g. I really like "unless" because it allows me to
> specify exactly what I want to express, when I use it.

While Larry can certainly be credited with putting it in Perl,
"unless" was a part of Lisp before Perl was a twinkle in Larry's eye.

Re: License to Steal

[Florian Weimer]

dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner) writes:

> On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> wrote:
> > Nothing has changed.  My last job at Fleet, I was
> > handed an application suite written in 12 different
> > programming languages, and, it being among the
> > missing, added Ada 83 to the mix on my own.  Oh, in
> > 1992 - 1994.
> 
> 12 full programming languages, or are you counting stuff like
> make and autoconf?

A web site I'm maintaining is implemented in six or seven programming
languages.  12 isn't that high a number. :-/

Re: License to Steal

[Stephen Leake]

Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com> writes:

> The problem is not languages, it's who we allow to create software.
> There's no easy way to determine if someone is a coder or part of that
> 2%. 

Hmm. Seems like you could just ask if they like Ada :). Also ask if
they like Emacs; I bet there's a strong correlation.

> If we could restrict professional software development to software
> engineers, Ada would be much more popular.

And software would be more respectible!

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: License to Steal

[Ted Dennison]

In article <uk841ghon.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov>, Stephen Leake says...
>
>Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com> writes:
>> If we could restrict professional software development to software
>> engineers, Ada would be much more popular.
>
>And software would be more respectible!

..and so expensive that only governments and Fortune 500 companies could afford
it.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

Re: License to Steal

[Alejandro R. Mosteo]

Stephen Leake ha escrito esto previamente:

> Hmm. Seems like you could just ask if they like Ada :). Also ask if
> they like Emacs; I bet there's a strong correlation.

See... I love Ada but hate Emacs. I love vi... so what am I? :-)

------------------------------
Alejandro R. Mosteo
mailto: 402450@cepsz.unizar.es
------------------------------

RE: License to Steal

[Beard, Frank]

> Alejandro wrote:
> 
>See... I love Ada but hate Emacs. I love vi... so what am I? :-)
An enlightened C programmer. ;-)

I love Ada but I hate both Emacs and vi.

I prefer a GUI oriented IDE with some power.  I miss some of
the features of both editors, but not nearly enough to ever
go back.  I guess that makes me a soft Adaphile.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Alejandro R.Mosteo [mailto:402450@cepsz.unizar.es]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 1:38 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: License to Steal


Stephen Leake ha escrito esto previamente:

> Hmm. Seems like you could just ask if they like Ada :). Also ask if
> they like Emacs; I bet there's a strong correlation.

See... I love Ada but hate Emacs. I love vi... so what am I? :-)

------------------------------
Alejandro R. Mosteo
mailto: 402450@cepsz.unizar.es
------------------------------
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RE: License to Steal

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <mailman.988913824.5508.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, "Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil> writes:
>> Alejandro wrote:
>> 
>>See... I love Ada but hate Emacs. I love vi... so what am I? :-)
> An enlightened C programmer. ;-)
> 
> I love Ada but I hate both Emacs and vi.

I love Ada but ignore Emacs and vi.  TECO forever !

RE: License to Steal

[Alejandro R. Mosteo]

Larry Kilgallen ha escrito esto previamente:

> I love Ada but ignore Emacs and vi.  TECO forever !

I've heard that last VisualStudio version allows to use any OLE compliant 
editor to be used integrated in the IDE. That's my heaven... AdaGide or 
similar with Vi keys... ah...

------------------------------
Alejandro R. Mosteo
mailto: 402450@cepsz.unizar.es
------------------------------