Re: NOACE- End of the road for Ada?

[Michael Card <thehouseofcards@remove.this.part.mac.com>]

In article <mailman.7.1110431487.23655.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org>,
 "Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu> wrote:

> Think about China. Guess, which complex and purposeful software is easier to
> investigate, modify/adapt, port to other equipment/environment etc. - that is
> written in Ada or that in C++ and/or Java?
> 
> Imaging yourself being a mainland Chinese and working in some military outfit
> and periodicaly receiving USA military software source code (which comes from
> the sources certainly unknown to you). What would you prefer in this position
> - Ada source code or C++/Java source code?
> 
> Then, even for your own (not stolen) code, you'll never have a choice of a
> programming language - it will be prescribed to you, and those who choose it
> inevitably will look at the world leader and follow it - then you'll get
> what the world leader choose... but without many auxiliaries and various
> supports that those working for the former have.

Alexander-

Are you postulating here that the US DoD is deliberately choosing 
programming languages that promote obfuscation for the purpose of 
thwarting Chinese intelligence operations? If I have understood you 
correctly, that strikes me as a rather far-fetched premise.

Whenever I have searched for the justification for these decisions, what 
you hear is stuff like "we want to use what everyone in the commercial 
world is using because it's easier to find programmers." It's rather a 
fad-chasing mentality, which seems strange given what we're talking 
about building. I find it hard to believe the use of C/C++ actually 
saves money vs. Ada no matter how many C++ programmers are on 
monster.com. 

Does anyone know of any actual cost data that supports the "fad-du-jour 
language X is cheaper than Ada due to availability of programmers" 
argument?

-Mike