Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Jeffrey R. Carter" <jrcarter@acm.org> writes:

> Markus E Leypold wrote:
>> I'm glad you take this with a bit of humor. But I would like to
>> emphasize once again that -- not only in the game Ada vs. C, but
>> most/every other programming language / development paradigm advocacy
>> -- I'm missing hard data.

> Hard data are hard to come by. 

Yes, but -- computer science and software engineering strife to be
_science_. So there should be a bit more proof and a bit less advocacy
(I've elaborated on this on one of the posts that went into a black
hole).

> Few organizations have the resources or the inclination to do such
> studies.

Simple: Science, esp. software engineering should. A whole discipline
of science (materials science)is dedicated to evaluate, test, and
describe the properties of new and old materials. Another science
disciplin (education science) is dedicated to research how to teach
things and how people learn things (not such a hard science but the
results are overall still better and more reliable than just having
Joe Sixpack say his part about how education should be done).

I think that there should be a discipline in computer science that
researches and quantitatively classifies the tools and methods which
are used to create new programs. Actually there is such a discipline
(software engineering) but there is also a lot of advocacy and
philosophy there and not so much hard data.

Presently I not, that new paradigms are put forward more in a
religious manner, and if they succeed just produce more opportunity for
research how to support the paradigm with give tools -- whereas the
first proof that the new paradigm / technique actually buys anything
is usually a bit thin.


> Where we do have hard data (that I know of) are 2 studies, 1 by
> Rational available at adaic.org, and the other by P&W, posted here
> some years ago by Condic; McCormick's results; results published by
> Praxis on the C-130J project; and a controlled study at the US
> Military Academy comparing Ada and Pascal as 1st-course languages
> published in /Ada Letters/.

Amazing. 2 Studies for 20 years of Ada :-).

> The 1st 2 both showed that Ada, compared to C, offered a factor of 2
> improvement in cost of reaching deployment, a factor of 4 improvement
> in post-deployment errors, and a factor of 10 improvement in cost of
> correcting a post-deployment error.

Actually I know the study by Rational.

> The 3rd we've discussed adequately here, I think.

Yes.

> The 4th showed a factor of 10 improvement in post-deployment errors
> compared to C (and a further factor of 10 improvement of SPARK over
> Ada).


Impressive :-).

> The 5th concluded that Ada was a better 1st-course language than Pascal.

I'm a bit surprised, actually. I would have thought Pascal simpler to
learn.

I'll have to try to find those studies some time in the future and
read up on them. 

Unfortunately, even agreeing Ada is the "better language" in most
aspects as a programming language (and I can imagine a number of
scenarios where some of the Ada stuff really get's in the way and that
is e.g. when I want to write something without the Ada runtime: I can
write a GNU Pascal procedure and link it into a C program, but can I
do that with something compiled by GNAT?), whatever -- even agreeing
Ada is the "better language", I've tried to point out in other posts
(hopefully not all of which went into the black whole) that -- coming
back to the topic of the thread -- real world decisions for tools are
not always influenced by technical merit alone. Availability of
libraries, costs of entering a market, existing code base, available
tools + compilers, flexibility after deciding on certain tools (read
alternative tools and second source vendors) are also important. Some
people here have argued along the line that "people simply don't know
better". I find that difficult to accept.

Regards -- Markus