Re: Ada is not a failure.

[fedfil!news@uunet.uu.net (news)]

Richard Nixon said it best and said it first:

I am not a crook!

The fact that the guy had to make the statement told the entire story.

Same with the "Ada is not a failure..." thread here.

What's your definition of a failure?

Take Ada for example.  The story begins in 1980 with Charles Hoare, one of
the world's formost computer scientists, using the occasion of his receipt
of the Turing award at the AACM to publically state that Ada is an unsafe
language and implore Americans not to use it in anything with serious
consequences.

Then you have ten years worth of horror stories in journals, all basically
describing intelligent people spending 15 hours working around Ada and one
hour attempting to solve their problem.  That is no way to live.

Next you have the Adawoe BBS.  They put that there to collect what they
figured would be a few minor glitches to fix with 9X;  instead, they got
hundreds of horrific accounts of total disaster caused by the inability
of the Ada language to function on the most basic levels.

Finally, we have the father of Ada, Dr. Ichbiah, doing a Pontius Pilate
and claiming that the 9X effort is a disaster, the people involved with
it a bunch of clowns, and that he does not want his name associated with
it any longer.

At no point in any of this have any serious people ever shown the least
interest in Ada.  The American software development community has
irrevocably standardized on C/C++ and none of your major players,
such as Borland, Symantec, or MicroSoft has even bothered to write an
Ada compiler.  I asked Philippe Kahn about this once at a meeting of the
DC area CPCUG, and he replied that there was no reasonable way to
implement an Ada compiler, i.e. the language itself was FUBAR.

All of this meets my definitely of failure, total failure, abject
humiliating failure, in spades.

The handwriting is on the wall.  Anybody who has been involved with Ada
would be spectacularly well advised to begin looking for an honest job
now.





-- 
Ted Holden
HTE