Re: Ada Dual-Use Conference

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>From: dweller@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (David Weller)
>Greg, why don't you change your tune?  YOu keep citing the same
>problems (including that annoying AF AI thingy) and spouting the same
>rants.  Can't you come up with something original?  

David,
	The Air Force's KBSA project is a large AI CASE effort that is
mostly non-Ada, and thus its contractors are in direction violation of
the Ada Mandate, as well as the spirit of the Ada Mandate.  It is not a
"thingy" as you so dismiss, but a program as far reaching as the STARS
project, if not more, because many involved with KBSA are in the universities,
spending their non-Ada DoD money to train new programmers.  To have both
KBSA and STARS is a contradiction (which was reflected in Mosemann's Air Force
AI memo where he didn't have enough guts to direct the Air Force to use Ada).
And because the Army and Navy see that the Air Force is being allowed to
spend lots of money and non-Ada CASE efforts, they too are starting to fund
non-Ada CASE efforts, which probably pleases ARPA to no end as it funds tons
of non-Ada CASE technology.  If you are the type that encourages members of
the Armed Forces to ignore federal laws, what other crimes to you encourage
them to commit?

	The Ada Mandate has been hypocrisy from day one, as the Pentagon
turned a blind eye towards countless violations of the Mandate.  The DoD
is about as comfortable with the Ada Mandate as it is with homosexuality:
for it has the same policy for both - we won't crack down on what you don't
tell us about.  No one wants to measure the percentage of Ada use inside
the DoD because that directly reveals to the Pentagon what it doesn't want
to know: who isn't using Ada - because if it did know it would be forced to
enforce the Mandate that would violate so many turf boundaries that chaos
would quickly occur. In short, DoD apathy fosters hypocrisy which leads to
waste.

	WHy do I keep on harping about the same abuses of waste, fraud and
incompetence?  Because they remain untreated by the professionals in the
DoD.  The Ada Mandate remains nothing more than a license for vendors and
contractors to gouge taxpayers with uncompetitive Ada technologies, all
the while developing products that allow them to claim to the commercial
world that use of their tools on C++ is as cost effective as with Ada.

	So they have the best of both worlds - they gouge the taxpayers
supporting an idiotic Ada policy while using some of these profits to
develop C++ tools which they peddle to the public with the same claims
for C++ that they make for Ada in the DoD world.  Nothing illegal about
taking advantage of the amateurs in the DoD in this way, but utterly
hypocritical and causing Ada's market share to stagnate.  After all,
when was the last time you saw a full page ad for an Ada compiler with
any pricing mentioned anywhere?  So much for the marketing of the very
best language in existence.

	Look at IBM, for a while an even bigger cheerleader for Ada than
you try to be.  Yet once the Ada pork started drying up, IBM dumped its
Ada stuff, and threw all of its corporate weight being C++ and Smalltalk.
Not once since IBM has abandonded Ada has it publicly said anything about
Ada, and certainly not all of the BS it slung at the DoD.  And I know that
many of the others praising Ada will sing another tune once even more pork
dries up.

	My song remains the same because their's does.

	But hey, have fun encouraging and supporting the breaking of a
federal law - hope you are making some money at it.

Greg Aharonian