Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Problem: Those were big companies and the projects were very long lived
where software development was not going to be the cost or schedule driver.
How many commercial products are in that position? Your average
garage-startup company is never going to be able to let out contracts to get
a compiler retargeted and your average small business is never going to be
able to wait until the retargeted compiler is ready to use before they can
start development.

Ada shot itself in the foot early on because it was A) Too expensive, B)
Didn't work well and C) Wasn't available for the platforms people were
developing on. It pretty much cured those problems by now - but too late to
avoid all the damage and missed opportunities. Now it faces new problems and
it has to address those if it hopes to avoid the same missed opportunities.

MDC
--
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:80F453381B124BF8.ACEC58777658C8DC.89DCAA63449DBB7B@lp.airnews.net...
>
> In the very early 1980s, General Dynamics / Fort Worth Division started
the
> F-16C/D program.  This was a MAJOR upgrade of the airplane, involving,
among
> other things, all new computers and all new software.
>
> Ada wasn't there yet, so they chose JOVIAL J73.
>
> At that time, there existed precisely one J73 compiler, and it didn't
target
> EITHER of the processors they were designing into the airplane (Zilog
Z8002
> and MIL-STD-1750A).  They wound up having to let compiler development
> contracts to two (small) companies to develop toolsets.
>
> At that time, trained J73 programmers just plain didn't exist.  GD/FW had
to
> train every single programmer they hired for that project.
>
> Every time I hear someone grumbling about the scarcity of trained Ada
> programmers, I think about F-16C/D and JOVIAL, and I wonder how GD/FW ever
> managed to get that airplane off the ground, if training is so hard.
>
> I'm not even going to mention HAL/S, the Space Shuttle language, which to
my
> (unclassified) knowledge was not used for anything else on the planet.
> Where does NASA (and the SEI Level 5 contractor) get trained HAL/S
> programmers?
>
>
>