Strassman says Ada is not cost effective

Strassman says Ada is not cost effective

[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.

-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
 Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

Re: Strassman says Ada is not cost effective

[Aaron Akman]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Aug17134325@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
 Aharonian) writes:

  >>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

Actually, the most pro-Ada magazine article I've ever read was written by Paul
Strassman.  It's in the September 1992 issue of American Programmer.  Take a
look...it's really an eye-popper.  Here are some select quotes from the
article: 

	A recent study that explored the question, "Who are the resisters to
the adoption of Ada?" showed that the resisters are predominately the creative
loner-programmers...[it gets much juicier]

	The essence of Ada is its highly disciplined, structured approach that
enforces a manufacturinglike process on software design...by far the best
choice that meets the wide diversity...for at least the next decade.

	Conversion from a "craft" to an "industrial" mode...is the only way I
know to cope with the new demands, and Ada is the computer language of choice
to support this goal.


I'm not quoting from this article to support it, but I think it's a bit
misleading to quote Strassman to support your crusade when he can just as
easily be quoted as saying that Ada is the language of choice for the next
decade.


--

aaron@iscp.bellcore.com (Aaron Akman)
RRC 4B-325, x6262