Re: employment with ada

["William J. Thomsa" <wjthomas@wcvt.com>]

> I've just returned from the Software Technology Conference, a large
> conference and trade show for DoD types, held annually in Salt Lake
> City.  What I saw there leads me to say this:
>
> While Ada is truely a superior language, I believe you should rethink
> getting into it on anything above a hobby basis.
>
> At the conference, one of the 40 minute talks was given by Lockheed
> Martin on the Fate of Ada in the Joint Strike Fighter project.
>
> Starting out by saying that they are all personally Ada zealots, and
> strongly believe the langauge to be superior to anything else around,
> the company was forced, by business realities, to do their safety
> critical software in the Joint Strike Fighter in a safety critical
> subset of C.
>
> The safety critical subset of C is C with 172 restrictions, augmented
> by a source code analyzer to look out for problems.
>
> Why give up on Ada?  They actually did a study - this isn't just
> someone's personal preference or prejudice.  They found:
>
> 1) No college in this country is teaching Ada.  There may be some
> qualifiers on that that I don't remember, such as "as a major portion
> of their program", or something like that, but in short there isn't a
> source of new Ada programmers, nor is there likely to be.
>
> 2) If they hire someone and train them in Ada, and designate them to
> program in Ada, all too often that person thinks to himself, "I'm
> learning a dead langauge, with nowhere to go if this project fails or
> completes" and the next thing you know, that person is in an exit
> interview, looking for a job that will provide "marketable skills."
>
> 3) The people fleeing Ada are right - there were, at last survey 2
> years ago, 5% Ada jobs.  An informal survey of the latest job market
> puts it at around 1%.
>
> 4) They projected that they would have to go thru several code
> overhauls to change compilers as Ada compiler providers either went
> out of business, or dropped Ada compilers from their product line.
>
> They emphasized, over and over, that they are personally Ada zealots,
> but from a business perspective, Ada for much of the JSF code would be
> a boneheaded business decision.  4% of the operational flight program
> will be in Ada, the remainder in that subset of C.  Program-wide,
> including the support software such as trainers, Ada will acount for
> approx 1%.
>
> I understand it.  I hate it, but I understand it.  The road to Ada, in
> 2003, now leads to a garbage pit.
>
> I was about to say that the only hope to do Ada at all in the future
> might be working for the government, but I already do that, and see
> that the government has two problems.  These are:
>
> 1) The government is attempting to contract everything out.  If you
> are in software at all in the government, you probably have a future
> as a contract monitor.
>
> 2) Talk around where I work, where they actually do Ada, is toward
> moving to C or C++.  I don't think we've done any Lockheed-Martin-like
> studies, but those who think themselves futurists seem to be saying
> this more and more.
>
> Much as I hate to say it, I think Ada is dead.  If Lockheed Martin
> can't make a business case for choosing Ada, who can?  What project
> would still choose it, and why?  I can't think of anyone who could
> justify swimming upstream like that.
>
> Anyone?
>
> Dave Head

C with 172 restrictions, what does that leave about 5 features and a "goto"
statement? Talk about being stuck on a job with a dead language, gee won't
those programmers be worth their weight in gold.

Compared to Ada, 'C' has always been restricted.  In 'C' I have that
incredibly heavy weight abstraction mechanism, the function, Oh and lets not
forget that other architectural powerhouse, the file. In Ada I actually have
to choose which features I'm going to bring to bear on my architecture. The
features I get in Ada (which are enforced by gee, a compiler) I will have to
acheive and enforce outside of the 'C' language. And with what, code
checking tools, methodologies, UML, please..., any of us with a few gray
hairs knows just how, with lots of cheap 'C' programmers and plenty of
debugging time.

The arguments that I've heard against Ada are the same arguments I've been
hearing for 20 years. First of all anyone can learn Ada, and with a little
in-house training you can actually bring most developers around to your way
of thinking.  Second , since 1986 good Ada compilers have always been and
always will  be available. And third, well, who cares, LMCO has made a
decision and they are going to have to live with it.

I just hope the JSF project gathers some good metrics, and then I hope
someone eventually compares them to the F22 project!

William J. Thomas