ARPA,Air Force,Navy publicly brag about a great C++ code

ARPA,Air Force,Navy publicly brag about a great C++ code

[Gregory Aharonian]

    From the August 30 issue of Government Computer News, page 68 (somewhat
condensed)

              DOD trains soldiers with virtual battlefield

	NPSNET is the first interactive virtual environment to be networked
	based according to developers of a battlefield simulation coded
	by programmers at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Air Force
	Institute of Technology.

	Using DoD's DIS protocols, NPSNet is available to 150 DoD sites
	via a gateway to the Defense Simulation Internet.  [Stuff about
	how players interact in real time with great graphics, problems
	in writing code to handle these effects].

	NPSNet has as one purpose to be placed in the public domain a
	visual simulation shell and related network routines to give
	defense laboratories and contractors a low-cost entry for
	further virtual reality.

	NPSNet, sponsored by ARPA, has cost the government $750,000 per
	year.  NPS and AFIT have distributed 50 copies of the C++ source
	code to DoD sites, saving the government $50,000 to $80,000 per
	copy.

	NPSNet, was shown off to at Siggraph to spark interest and
	suggestions from computer graphics experts around the world,
	said the program head, Lt. Col. David Neyland.
==============================================================================

     As great an effort as this is, and as much as I like the programming
efforts going on at NPS and AFIT (two fine educational institutions), stuff
like this is truly horrible for helping Ada succeed.  It sends out virtually
every wrong signal to the non-Mandated world that the DoD doesn't believe
its own beliefs about Ada.

     First, if you can't say something good about an Ada program to the
press, don't say something better about a C++ program.  It makes the all
encompassing Ada Mandate look even more idiotic than it is.  Too many
non-Mandated people are picking up on the fact that all they seem to
see in good news coming out of the DoD about programming rarely deals
with Ada.  The majority of success stories in GCN over the last three
years have all been about DoD units using C/C++ - not Ada.

     Second, people in the non-Mandated world once again are seeing another
success story with software with ARPA involvement that does not involve Ada.
Many non-Mandated people wonder why the leading software agency of the DoD,
ARPA, refuses to have anything to do with Ada.  You can't praise ARPA to
the high heavens, and then allow it to dis Ada.

     Third, it provides indirect proof that whatever is going on in the
STARS program is a complete waste of money.  It seems when ever the DoD
manages to creat a good thing, which NPSNet is, it goes out of its way to
expose it to the public to benefit the public and to get feedback from
the public (the comments of Lt. Col. Neyland).  One can only assume that
when the DoD has created a mess, it does its best to hide it from the public
as much as possible, i.e., STARS.

     Fourth, this article sends a signal that for state of the art
programming activities, virtual reality, interactive graphics, distributed
processing, networking and communications, that Ada is not the language to
use.  When I suggest that the Mandated world appear at trade shows, I
meant appear with Ada stuff.

     It is stuff like this that is killing Ada, not my attitude.
-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
 Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

Re: ARPA,Air Force,Navy publicly brag about a great C++ code

[Robert Dewar]

At last, Ted Holden said something I agree with. He said he would have a
hard time convincing X of Y, for some X, Y, hardly important what. Since
this is just a special case of the obvious universal truth that Ted Holden
would have a hard time convincing anyone of anything, his claim must be
trivially true :-)

Re: ARPA,Air Force,Navy publicly brag about a great C++ code

[Harry Erwin]

The problem with Ada is that it doesn't do what it was designed to do well
enough to overcome its short-term economic disadvantages. Ada is a niche
language (high reliability applications, embedded applications, and
maintainable applications), and it has to do those -->very<-- well to
survive. The successor to Ada should not be Ada++. Rather, it should be a
language optimized for its niche. Based on watching a number of
interesting programs, I question whether Ada is good enough at what it is
supposed to do to survive. That's a shame, since my life sometimes depends
on software doing its function very reliably.

Cheers,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com
Working on Freeman nets....

Re: ARPA,Air Force,Navy publicly brag about a great C++ code

[Robert Dewar]

It's an interesting comment on the state of software engineering and softwar4e
production that Harry categorizes "maintainable applications" as a niche
area!