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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,f49c8f164340c377 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!out02a.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!in02.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!in03.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!newscon04.news.prodigy.net!prodigy.net!newsdst01.news.prodigy.net!prodigy.com!postmaster.news.prodigy.com!newssvr17.news.prodigy.net.POSTED!4988f22a!not-for-mail From: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <7744bf.vg4.ln@hunter.axlog.fr> Subject: Re: Current status of Ada? X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3138 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3138 X-RFC2646: Format=Flowed; Original Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.134.96.57 X-Complaints-To: abuse@prodigy.net X-Trace: newssvr17.news.prodigy.net 1188570285 ST000 70.134.96.57 (Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:24:45 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:24:45 EDT Organization: AT&T http://yahoo.sbc.com X-UserInfo1: O@Y[R^[GZRRER_H]]RKB_UDAZZ\DPCPDLXUNNHLHQAVTUZ]CLNTCPFK[WDXDHV[K^FCGJCJLPF_D_NCC@FUG^Q\DINVAXSLIFXYJSSCCALP@PB@\OS@BITWAH\CQZKJMMD^SJA^NXA\GVLSRBD^M_NW_F[YLVTWIGAXAQBOATKBBQRXECDFDMQ\DZFUE@\JM Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:25:08 -0700 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:1626 Date: 2007-08-31T07:25:08-07:00 List-Id: "Ed Falis" wrote in message news:PM000438DC8E87815A@tilopa.unknown.dom... > > Which does not contradict my statement in the context of the times. > Despite the superficially "fair" wording of the memo, it was almost > universally interpreted as DoD walking away from Ada. One of my > colleagues was at a meeting recently where some yoyo got up and said > "Thank God we got rid of Ada"! Probably because that was the "cool" > view among those who felt oppressed by the mandate (largely in terms of > their short-term profit margins). > > - Ed > I published an article in Crosstalk several years ago that attempted to clarify Mr. Paige's intent. I even sent him a draft of the article for his approval before publishing it. He agreed with my assessment and the content of the article. His original hope was that, having been proven successful in a lot of DoD projects, Ada would stand on its own and be chosen without the coercion of a DoD mandate. It has been suggested by some that there was a lot of "behind the scenes" influence from DoD contractor executives to get rid of the Ada mandate. There may have been some of this, but there was also a lot of controversy generated in other quarters. Some people in this forum may recall the flurry of email and forum postings from some pipsqueak (I cannot recall his name) who constantly bombarded Mr. Paige and other DoD executives with diatribes about both Ada and their management of Ada. It did not help at all that some former AJPO officials, in particular Don Reifer, became turncoats and used their visibility in the software industry to publicly denigrate and discourage the use of Ada in DoD publications such as Crosstalk. I used to do a lot of training and consulting for Lockheed and CSC related to the Aegis project. Soon after the Paige memo, Lockheed dictated that the software for Aegis would be written in C++ instead of Ada. Almost all training in Ada stopped, and the programmers were given intensive training in C++. I told everyone that it was a big mistake, but my advice was of little interest to those who were already biased toward C++. The answer was, "We can find C++ programmers right out of university CS programs, but no one teaches Ada in CS." A lot of the early frustration with Ada 83 was justified. There were things one could not do easily with it. Some of the work-arounds required on some projects were horrible. There was no language defined data type for unsigned integers and I recall a project where that took a lot of time away from the programming effort just to invent a work-around. Hobbyists, many of whom were more influential than anyone realized, found they could not easily format a simple MS-DOS screen with most compilers. The compiler vendors resorted to ANSI.SYS, which was simply another work-around. Alsys did have a special package that supported an unsigned integer, and I recall a USMC project where we were able to access B800(Hex) area of memory to directly access the video display mapping. With Ada 95, a lot of things got better. We no longer had to make excuses for, nor invent work-arounds for, that lack of inheritance. It does not matter who made the mistake of excluding inheritance from the language in the first place. I remember many discussions where I was defending Ada 83 because it did not support extensible inheritance. As it turns out, we still don't use inheritance that much for safety-critical software anyway. And we certainly don't use dynamic binding. In spite of the good efforts of people like Ed Falis and Ben Brosgol at Alsys, commercial adoption was a failure. In fact, it was due to the efforts of those two people that Ada 95 did become hospitable to commercial and business data processing applications. Unfortunately, the compiler publishers ensured that no one in the commercial world would use Ada by: 1) pricing the compilers so no one could afford them, and 2) separating Ada from the rest of their product line by relegating it to a sales option for their Federal division. At IBM and Rational, very few people on the commercial side of the sales force had any knowledge of Ada. The consortiums (ARA, etc.) found a way to waste money on some of the most absurd ad campaigns ever launched. Does anyone remember those ridiculous ads in the late 1990's. That was money down the drain. Ada continues to be the best option for safety-critical and military weapon systems. I work in a DoD organization and try to promote it whenever I can. My reasons for promoting Ada for DoD software have little to do with Ada, per se, but with my concern about the dependability of software that must work right everytime it is used. With Ada we have a better chance of achieving that goal than we do with C or C++, or even Java. I have even been called an "Ada bigot," and sometimes described as a "throwback" for my views on programming language choice. As nearly as I can tell, my continued advocacy of Ada for DoD software puts me in a very small minority of the "quaint but tolerated" software community. Most of my Ada-knowledgeable colleagues have given up the fight and gone on to other things. They have concluded that C++ is good enough; Java is good enough; Python is good enough. One of my students told me recently of a flight-control system on one of our military aircraft where the software is written in VisualBasic. I hope he is wrong. When the Paige memo came out, I commented in a public article (in JOOP) that, if the DoD cannot manage a single language policy, how do they expect to manage a multiple-language policy. They can't. They have decided to let the contractors make the choice. The long-term consequences of this abrogation of responsibility will be dire, but no one seems to care. I realize that many in this forum are not concerned with warfighting software. Perhaps the commercial software you are developing will make enough difference that some of those in the DoD who need to understand the issues of software decision-making will come to their senses when they see the results of your work. However, it is too late for influencing the DoD contractors. They are now free to use any language they wish, including some proprietary language they might invent or extensions to some existing language that no one else knows about. The Paige memo did its damage. Now we need to find some way to repair that damage. It might be too late. On the bright side, SPARK is "sparking" renewed interest in Ada -- as long as we don't call it Ada. Richard Riehle