Re: Ada caused failure of IBM's attempt to redesign air traffic system?

[mheaney@ni.net (Matthew Heaney)]

>>IBM sold the entire Bethesda Md. branch involved in that paroject to Loral, 
>and
>>then the project was abandoned.  Ada was the chief cause of the failure.

Time and time again I've seen Ada criticized.  Why is Ada every lame
programmer's whipping post?  Why don't these guys get a life?

Why don't these programmers - instead of blaming Ada - just admit they
don't have a clue about software engineering?

Ada was not the cause of the failure.  Management was the cause of the
failure.  Why can't software managers take responsibility for their own
inability to do their jobs?

If you don't know how to construct a large, complex software system, then
the problem is that you don't know how construct a large, complex software
system.  That Ada was somehow the cause is a completely specious argument. 
As if you could do it better with some other language.

The author of the original post seems like yet another poor programmer who
values cleverness and obfuscation over elegance and understandability. 
Feeling a little intimidated by Ada, are we?  Maybe it's time you got a
different hobby.

Now that Ada's got inheritance, polymorphism, and function & stack-variable
pointers, those captious, anti-Ada programmers don't have anything left to
criticize.  But that doesn't seem to stop them.

Ada is moribund?  Put a nail in Ada's coffin, you say?  Not while I have
anything to say about it.

M.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Heaney
Software Development Consultant
mheaney@ni.net
(818) 985-1271