Re: Ichbiah's letter to Anderson: Here it is

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

>    But with the Ada Mandate as a national law, the DoD (which I assume
>>supports the Mandate and pushed for it), has to make sure that the
>>language is thriving enough to insure a sufficient supply of programmers,
>>tools, and advanced software technology compatibility. ...
>
>     For decades the DoD has trained programmers in its arcane languages. 
>When the Ada effort began it was a purely DoD project aimed a producing a
>purely DoD language, with the implicit understanding that the DoD would
>continue to train programmers to use its single new language.  Just because
>Ada turned out to be an excellent general purpose software engineering
>language doesn't mean that the DoD has suddenly been saddled with a respon-
>sibility to promote it on the outside.  A cost/benefit analysis might prove
>that for the DoD it is better to ignore the outside world.  (To my knowl-
>edge such an analysis has not been done.)  This is not to deny that the
>computing community at large might be better served by a wider acceptance
>of Ada.  I believe that to be the case.  What's not clear to me is why some
>people consider it obvious that the DoD should spend part of its budget
>promoting this wider acceptance.

    The first responsibility of the DoD is to develop systems as cheaply
as possible (without comprimising safety, quality, etc).  If it is indeed
true that over the life-cycle it is cheaper to develop systems in C/C++
than in Ada (and there is enough circumstantial evidence like JINTACCS
to study the problem), than I feel as a taxpayer that the DoD has two choices.

   Choice one is to insure that Ada is as cost-effective as C/C++, which
requires many work outside of the Mandated world in terms of greater Ada
acceptance in programmer supply, tools, products and companies.  Either
on its own, or by making its contractors do so, it has to make Ada competitive.

   Choice two is to allow C/C++ to be used in defense projects, to altar[sic]
the Mandate to allow C/C++ to be used without waivers (if this is not
already true , as in the JINTACCS and who knows what else).

   I have been gathering many statistics, and outside the Mandated world,
C/C++ activities in a macroeconomic sense are at least ten to twenty times
larger than for Ada.  With all of this market attention on C/C++, over
time C/C++ programmers, tools and libraries are going to get better and
better, making their use in development very cost effective.  At the same
time, for Ada things will stagnate and it will drop farther and farther
behind C/C++ to the point the differential will be so significant that
those currently battle against Ada inside the DoD will have the upper hand.

    The whole point of all of my messages to date is that the Ada Mandate
is a gross distortion of the marketplace with very significant economic
implications that have never been fully examined by the DoD.  The one
study to touch upon the subject, the Mosemann studies, when the substudies
weren't contradicting each other, were highly deficient on the demographic
statistics of the economics of C/C++ and Ada as to render their conclusions
irrelevant.

    Given the related business mistakes such as the software reuse efforts
and the STARS welfare project, it is obvious that there is a need for serious
economic analysis of the microeconomics of defense software development.
I have much raw data that does not paint a pretty picture.  At best, given
what I have seen, over the life-cycle, using C/C++ is slightly more cost
effective than Ada.  At worst, it's much better.  To stick with the Ada
Mandate and one language is then a betrayal of the American taxpayer.

>>    Given the Mandate, and the reality of Ada, when all of its contractors
>>and compiler vendors drop the ball promoting Ada, its up to the DoD to
>>assume the responsibility, especially to demand more from anyone taking
>>Ada money.
>
>     Again, who is "taking Ada money"?  The DoD awards contracts and the
>contractors try to fulfill them.  If the DoD wants the contractors to do
>something, put it into the contract.

   Exactly.  The DoD is not a business.  We expect them to be a bunch of
socialist killers, that is a top-down, centralized entity of soldiers with
weapons.  I have no problem with that.  What I do have a problem with is
when these same people try to act like capitalist business men.  They
aren't and they can do it very well.  The Ada Mandate forces the DoD to
become businessmen - to have to deal with marketing, competition, free
market supply and demand, cost/benefit analysis, investment, etc.  The
DoD has never done this very well, and the one agency that does this
some of the time, DARPA, has to violate the Mandate to fulfill its
mission, since none of the advanced software they fund (AI, parallel,
nat lang, distributed) is being seriously done in Ada anywhere in the
country.

    The Mandate is not supposed to be a tool of control for the DoD over
its contractors, nor should it be an artificial prop for a questionable
economic proposition.

           IF ADA IS AS COST-EFFECTIVE AS ITS PROPONENTS PROCLAIM,
           THE MANDATE WOULD BE IRRELEVANT, SINCE FOR EVERY BIDDED
           PROJECT, THE ADA BIDS WOULD ALWAYS BE LOWER.

It isn't, and the Mandate is a disservice to the American public.

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