Re: Open comment to Ted Holden

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!news.bbn.com!kirin!m fausett@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Mark Fausett)]

vanderwerkend@lonexc.rl.af.mil (Dan Vanderwerken) writes:

>In article <SRCTRAN.92Apr9102404@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
 Aharonian) writes:
>>Sam,
>[stuff about Ada not being cost effective deleted....]

>One of the bigger (and cost effective) advantages of Ada is it ease of 
>maintainability.  Instead of giving some contractor one hundred thousand
>lines of spegetti code in C, we give them Ada.  Now, I don't tremendous person
al

Funny, I've seen lots of spaghetti code writting in almost every language,
including Ada.  Good program design and implementation are much more an 
attribute of the programmer than the implementation language.

>experiance saying Ada is better to maintain, but everything I've dealt with
>does strongly suggest this is the case.  Just for the record, I'm fairly
>certain the maintenance costs of our weapon systems far exceed the development
>costs.  This _is_ something to think about.

Absolutely; the bulk of the cost, expecially in military systems is in
maintenance, especially since the military never seems to throw anything away.
In fact, I remember rumors of the USAF negotiating a contract for 20 years of
maintenance on a Honeywell DPS-8 running GCOS, when GCOS was already 10 years
obsolete.

Still, I'd be willing to bet that a well-designed and written software system
in any language will be easier to maintain than a poorly designed and written
system in Ada.

While standardization may be desirable sometimes, we also have to remember that
computer langauges are TOOLS for expressing ideas in the form of programs.
Computer languages aren't usually created for the intellectual joy of creation
but rather to solve particular kinds of problems;  Thus some languages 
will be more effective at solving particular problems than others.  If you
doubt this, compare the difficulty of writing a heuristic search program in
LISP and {Ada, C, C++} etc., or an OS kernel in C versus {Ada, COBOL, etc.}.

It seems to me that the least-cost solution to solving a problem is to carefull
y
engineer the design, choose the right tools (language, development environment,
execution environment) for the job, and properly execute the design.
The only major drawback that I see is that maintenance programmers might be
forced to learn more than one computer language; something which a lot of peopl
e
seem to be inordinately afraid of.

Mark Fausett
mfausett@bbn.com