Re: An admittedly biased Ada/C++ comparison, by Ed Schonberg

[destroyer!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!eff!world!srctran@gumby.wisc.edu (Gregory Aharonian)]

    Much like the Mosemann studies, what's the point of this message?
Schonberg at the outset invokes the old Turing-equivalence of languages,
and then spends time implicitly arguing against it with his Ada and C++
comparisons, ignoring, much like the Mosemann studies the socioeconomics
of software development in a free market, which in the United States favor
developing software in C/C++, despite many of the benefits that Ada does
have over C/C++.  It seems silly to spend billions to develop software to
defend the free markets of America if we refuse to participate in these
free markets, which to some extent the DoD is doing with software development
policies that completely ignore the free markets of software.  It's the
opposite of the old joke in the CASE world :  "Our product is so good that we
use it to develop the product" in the defense world becomes "Our free markets
are so worth defending that we don't use them for defense".

     I was at the CASE WORLD exposition in Boston this month.  THe CASE
world has software technology NOW that is a few years ahead of anything in
the STARS program and other DoD software initiatives, making me wonder why
the DoD it feels it has to spend money to develop such capabilities.  Two
of the STARS primes were at CASE WORLD - IBM and UNISYS - but their large
booths did not even mention Ada or STARS.  Are they embarassed to show the
crap they feed to the DoD to the more discerning general public.
    One of Ada's shining points - the Booch components - were at CASE WORLD,
but only a company advertising a C++ version of the components.  I asked why
not push the Ada version, and they said (heresy) there was no profit in it.

Ada versus C/C++ - has nothing to do about software and everything to do
about economics.

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