Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Stephen Leake" <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote in message 
news:uy7nucb8e.fsf@stephe-leake.org...
>
> Or, in managers, "everyone else is using C, so it must be the best
> language". When I point out that far more programs are written in
> Visual Basic, or Excel, they look very puzzled :).
>
One of the long-forgotten success stories in Ada was at Xerox, another
company that has a history of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory.

A team of developers at Xerox decided to use Ada for the software on
a new Xerox copier.   The project was a resounding success and every
team member was enthusiastic about the potential for software on other
Xerox projects.   There were analyses showing how Ada was more
cost-effective than C or other alternatives.  It looked as if Ada might
have found its niche in commercial software development.

Not so.  In spite of all the evidence in support of Ada, some idiot
higher up in management decreed that all software must be written
in C.   He had no understanding of Ada.  All he knew was that it
was a DoD language and he wanted no part of it.

This story has repeated itself over and over.  As noted, a lot of people
are reluctant to use a language designed for "killing and maiming."  It
is silly, of course, but programming aptitude has never been a good
predictor for sensible decision-making.

There is a shortage of Ada programmers, so Lockheed-Martin made
the decision to use C++ on some of our major weapon systems. Not
a particularly wide decision.    They have discovered that, for the software
to be dependable, they must cripple C++ to the point where it is being
used as a "better C" and they have lost all the alleged benefits of C++
except one:  the larger population of university-trained C++ programmers.

Academia has been no better.  As long as the DoD funded projects related
to Ada, professors were happy to take the money.  Once the funding vanished,
those professors redirected their efforts to projects using newer whiz-bang
languages that looked good when they submitted papers for publication.

I recently had the opportunity to teach a beginning class in Java.  What I
discovered is that Java is not type safe, and includes a lot more opportunities
for programming errors than Ada.   It is not any better designed than Ada,
but it does have a lot of libraries.  Most important, it is easier to get a 
paper
published if it mentions Java than if it mentions Ada.  A few years ago I was
invited to submit a paper to a conference by the conference chairperson.  I
was told not to mention Ada.

For a variety of reasons, there is a lot of ignorance and bias regarding Ada and
it will not be easy to overcome.   One bright spot is that SPARK has achieved
a high level of respectability and SPARK is an Ada-based environment.

Richard Riehle