Re: Cost of Ada (was - Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)

[enterpoop.mit.edu!world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian)]

>Consider.  Most of the current customers for such systems are doing
>Defense work, where Ada is mandated.  They are, in effect, consumers
>in a captive market.  This artificially pushes the demand curve to a
>position where demand is artificially high at each market price and
>the elasticity of demand is quite low.  Hence, the supplier in such a
>market will exercise what is, after all, only good business sense, and
>will price their product artificially high in that market.
>Arbitrarily lowering their price in that kind of captive market
>situation leads to lower profits (since they make less on each of the
>'mandated' purchases).  This is why you will likely never see anything
>like a 'Turbo Ada' while the Mandate is in force, unless the
>government funds the thing itself (trying to correct market
>distortions caused by government intervention through the use of more
>intervention). 

This suggestion and others dealing with DoD Ada software policies pose very
interesting microeconomic conditions that have been totally ignored by the
DoD over the past ten years.  Many free market concepts - competition,
marketing, supply and demand, cost curves, etc - are for the most part no
reflected anywhere in DoD software policy planning.  There are no accounting
data sets to assess such questions, no microeconomic models to apply such
data to, and no interest inside the DoD, in particular the STARS effort,
to care or be concerned about such questions.  At least the Russian central
planners had economic models of what they were trying to do, even if the
models were lousy economics.

The problem with the Mandate is that it is part of the big Lie: that anyone
can claim anything about DoD software policies, knowing that no one downstream
will be able to veryify or disprove such claims, or remember what the original
claims were.  The STARS program, with its endless reorganizations and new
sets of claims, is a classic example.  Ada is just a side issue to the DoD
brass (my face is still blue holding my breath waiting for Strassman to
publicly mention Ada in one of his interviews).

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization
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Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178