From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 29 Apr 93 15:24:15 GMT From: world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Re: Ichbiah's letter to Anderson: Here it is Message-ID: List-Id: > 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 -- ************************************************************************** Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimiztion P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178