Strassman says Ada is not cost effective

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

>From the August 16, 1993 issue of Military and Aerospace Electronics, page 19

	Tuttle is not the only respected member of the defense community
	who believes Ada falls short as the cure-all for the department's
	soaring software costs.  Paul Strassman, former director of defense
	information in the Pentagon and now instructor of information
	warfare at the West Point, says Ada may not be the cost saver its
	proponents claim it is.  "The central issue is how do we get
	better defense for defense money, and Ada is not the golden bullet",
	says Strassman, who was executor of CIM until January 1993.
	
	"The economic driver really is software reuse", Strassman says.
	"The underlying reason for Ada originally was software reuse and
	software modularity.  Today, by and large, software reuse is
	being driven by the fact that software objects are commercially
	available, and most of the software objects on the market are just
	no Ada objects.  The world is not going the Ada way".

	Strassman, while offering that Ada does have its advantages, says
	the language may not be economically feasible in the long run.
	"Ada has real-time very highly specialized applications where many
	of the existing languages like C++ don't have dynamic capabilities".
	
	But when you go to the bulk of DoD applications, which are command
	and control and classic information systems, you increasingly have
	to depend on commercially available software to execute those
	systems.  Ada was a great idea, and Ada may have specialized use,
	but the systems of the futre most likely will not be copiously
	populated by Ada code".
==============================================================================

   These sentiments probably explain why when he was in office, Strassman
never mentioned Ada in interviews in the trade press - he didn't want to
lie about his belief in the cost effectiveness of Ada.  Can't wait to see
the interviews of others in Ada office's when they retire.

   Strassman's comments also won't go over well in the corporate MIS world,
given Strassman's original background in corporate MIS at Xerox.  One look
at his comments, and they will ignore Ada even more.

-- 
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 Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
 Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
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