Re: Air Force shows how meaningless Ada waiver process is

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Mike, to your claim that Ada companies bet on sales to the DoD under the
Mandate. Poppycock! at least if you are talking about all companies. ALsys
was a French company which always had far more employees in France than
in the US, and concentrated on sales in Europe where there is no mandate.

Alsys has shifted its emphasis somewhat with the Telesoft merger, but I
would still be willing to bet that a big part of its revenue comes from
non-DoD sources (including such US customers as NASA and Boeing commercial).

As for the claim that the mandate is responsible for the perceived poor
quality of Ada tools (a broad brush characterization that is not at all
generally fair -- there are good Ada tools and bad Ada tools around), I
know this is a popular view from the vendor-bashers club of which you
seem to be one of the founding members, but apart from a lot of rhetoric,
I have never seen any convincing argument that this is the case.

In fact, you could well argue that the failure of vendors to generate
sufficient revenue to support continued improvement etc was due to the
mandate not being enforced well enough, although that's also a hard
after-the-fact argument to make convincingly.

There - that should start a nice thread of diatribe. Perhaps I should
have changed the subject line to something more flamboyant :-)