Re: NOACE- End of the road for Ada?

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Michael Card"
<thehouseofcards@remove.this.part.mac.com> wrote
in message
news:thehouseofcards-A7CEC0.21331309032005@news.verizon.net...
> Hello everyone-
>
> It seems that everywhere I look, I see articles
about the DoD world
> being anxious to purge Ada from all their
systems in favor of C++ and
> Java. For example, see
>
The move toward Java has nothing to do with
whether Java is superior to
Ada. It's not.   Is it easier to learn than Ada?
No.   Is it more efficient
than Ada?  Certainly not.   Is it easier to code
than Ada?  Not at all.
Does it produce better executables?   Not at all.

So why is it taking over the programming landscape
like kudzu or crabgrass
on an Alabama lawn?

I attended a seminar presented by a U.S. Navy
Admiral a couple of years ago
on the subject of software in the Navy.   He
droned on for a while about his
view on this subject and finally came to Ada.  His
opening remarks to this
topic, "And then there was the Ada fiasco!"    In
his comments he noted that
Ada was hard to learn, even after hiring the best
teachers the Navy could find,
there were no good tools available for development
and maintenance, all
the programmers hated it, no one wanted to support
it, everything they did
related to Ada created more trouble than it was
worth.

This perception of Ada throughout much of the
Navy, and throughout much
of the DoD persists.  I work daily with DoD people
who believe Ada was one of
the most idiotic initiatives the DoD ever pursued.
At the school where I teach,
Ada was once required.  Now it is hardly mentioned
(except in some of my
classes).   Sometimes, when I visit the office of
one of my colleagues, I see
old copies of Ada books (most Ada 83) on the
bookshelves.    The only two
languages most people want to acknowledge are Java
and C++, and of those,
Java gets the larger share of attention.

Java, for all its faults, is the current darling
of decision-makers and academics.  Many
of my students find Ada easier to learn after they
have learned Java.    Most of them
hate C++, but the have to learn it to successfully
complete their required class in
computer graphics.   There are almost no
circumstances where they must use Ada,
let alone know anything about it.

I continue to believe that Ada is as good, often
better, as a programming language
than either Java or C++.   But that is not a
widespread belief throughout the DoD.
Rather, the more dominant view is that Ada is now
an old-fashioned language, more
in the category of PL/I, COBOL, old versions of
Fortran, etc.   It is seen as old,
in part because it is regarded as a language of
the early 1980's.   Java is the language
of now.    Ada is the language of then.   For
many, C++ is also the language of then.

There is no large company currently pushing Ada.
There are no substantial financial
resources behind it.   Even the companies that
publish Ada compilers, with the exception
of Ada Core, RR Software, and Irvine Compiler, are
focusing their attention and their
advertsising dollars on other products.

One Navy official said to me a couple of years
ago, "In five years you won't be able to
find anyone supporting Ada."   That was nearly
five years ago, and he was wrong.  But
how wrong was he?   Does IBM take its (Rational)
Ada compiler seriously anymore?

Ada certainly does not deserved the reputation it
has among DoD officials.   But, as long
as the majority of promotional dollars are devoted
to touting the (dubious) benefits of
technologies, even as those technologies are
inferior to Ada for military software,  Ada
will suffer.

Who will champion Ada?   Currently, no one with
influence or power will come forward
to encourage the use of Ada.   Sometimes I speak
with developers who prefer Ada and
still choose C++, not because they prefer it but
because it is the easiest choice to make.
Courage is not a common characteristic of DoD
developers.    To preach too openly
the benefits of Ada in the halls of a contractor's
office or the corridors of a DoD facility
is to risk being branded "some kind of nut."   I
have been called an "Ada bigot," more
times than I can count -- this, in spite of my
continual assertion that we should pick the
right tools for the right job -- and the right
tool is often, but not always, Ada.

Time for lunch.

Richard Riehle