From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,INVALID_DATE, LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d0ec83cbcafc6d7d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-03-05 22:49:55 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: sparky!uunet!caen!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!eff!world!srctran From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Re: Importance of Ada in DARPA, other federal R&D In-Reply-To: weide@cis.ohio-state.edu's message of 5 Mar 1993 10:31:19 -0500 Message-ID: Sender: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Organization: The World References: <1n7ro7INNpqi@elephant.cis.ohio-state.edu> Distribution: usa Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1993 16:50:48 GMT Date: 1993-03-05T16:50:48+00:00 List-Id: >There has been no shortage of discussion here about the role of Ada in >the defense and commercial software development sectors. Does anyone >have any opinion -- or even better, knowledge -- about the importance >of Ada in the R&D plans of DARPA (apparently again to be called ARPA) >and/or other federal agencies? Is it important to them? As a CS >researcher, this question is almost as important to me as Ada's >position in the software development community. As much as I have a low regard for DARPA's technology transfer capabilities, (after all when you spend over a billion dollars funding technical software development, but don't have a directory of where all this taxpayer funded stuff is (unlike Japan's Fifth Generation project), you're incompetent), I do have a high regard for the software they have had developed at their direction. And as DARPA tends to be interested in getting something that works, as opposed to being politically correct, Ada does not tend to be a big consideration. Considering that much of the advanced software that DARPA develops: parallel processing, artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, distributed computing, CAD/CAM/CAE/, etc, is all done by software communities wholly disinterested in Ada (most of whom associate, maybe prophetically, Ada with the American Disability Act), most of the software that DARPA funds is not written in Ada, and if forced to do so, would cripple these efforts to meet DoD high tech needs. So just by a surface examination of the results of DARPA funding, I doubt pushing Ada is big on their agenda, especially when a few of them went on record (as reported in Government Computer News last fall) as distancing themselves from Ada. Most state of the art in the United States for software and software related stuff (such as imaging through the atmosphere) is done by people using Fortran or C/C++ in communities that have for the most part rejected Ada. In fact, when Ada first hit the scene, I predicted that Ada would never gain much acceptance in these communities, simply because these peoples rely on hugh libraries of existing Fortran and C codes to do their studies, and at the time, the DoD (including DARPA) had no plans to convert these libraries over to Ada to encourage people to switch languages, since no matter how fantastically, incredibly, postively great Ada is or could be, these people won't switch because they need there existing large libraries of reusable code (like I said, the DoD is years behind some of these groups in large scale software reuse). At the time, some argued that converting these libraries (many of which I collect, totalling over ten million lines of code a billion dollar cost to convert at DoD contractor rates) should be the role of the private sector that I so champion here. And in fact, I was involved with three ventures to start such a business going, all three of which folded because of lack of business. Ada software reuse as a business has always been an impossible idea because of the losuy economics - trust me - I have lost enough of MY money trying. Too much of what DARPA needs depends on such processes for which Ada has had no impact. Thus there probably is little interest inside DARPA for pushing or caring about Ada because it interferes with its basic mission. Besides which, DARPA tends to go its own way from the rest of the DoD. For example, while it's idiotic for the DoD to have two major software reuse centers, DSRO and ASSET, it's even more idiotic for DARPA to start up a DoD software reuse center at VCOE (Virginia Center of Excellence). I mean, do you guys hate each other, or what? Let' see the Pentagon has a reuse center (DSRO), the Air Force has a reuse center (ASSET), the Army has a reuse effort (SIMTEL) and DARPA has a reuse center (VCOE). That leaves the Navy - hey, I am available for adopting, and I come much cheaper. As a CS researcher, don't worry about Ada. By the time you ramp upp you own efforts to incorporate Ada into your activities over the next few years, the DoD will have dropped the Ada mandate, and the language will disappear within a few years (to the Forth level). Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimization "If you are reading this, you can't deny knowledge of the Internet!" -- ************************************************************************** Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimiztion P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178