Re: ARPA still undermining Ada

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <37ib3r$314@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Mark, I couldn't agree more that it would have made sense for ARPA to fund
>a GNAT-like effort earlier. I flew down to Washington a couple of times
>a few years ago (i.e. several years before the GNAT work finally started)
>to try to sell this idea, but it didn't fly. We have Chris Anderson to
>thank for finally seeing that this was an important target of opportunity.
>

Yes indeed. I was, of course, well outside all those discussions,
but to this outsider's eyes, this was an inspired and courageous move
on Chris Anderson's part. To this day, some of the Ada vendors complain
about GNAT as "unfair competition." Clearly those vendors have no clue
about what it really takes to build grass roots support for a language
and get it widely propagated.

A full-bore implementation of Ada/Ed (with some tools, maybe even
a code generator or two, and some support for ongoing maintenance)
would, IMHO, have made a big difference if it had happened, say,
around 1989 or so. 

And speaking of Arcadia/UCI, I don't think it's ever been explained
why work on their very nice Ada interpretive environment, Arcturus, was
stopped just when it seemed to be on the verge of research and
educational usefulness. I assume it was a change in direction of the
ARPA sponsors, but then one wants to ask _why_. That would have been
a dynamite system.

A similar system, ACE (Ada Compilation Environment) was done by
(I guess) Unisys (or whatever they were called at the time) as a
STARS project, also ARPA-funded, and _that_ was halted just as it was
about to be useful for similar purposes. No public statement has ever
been made on the reason for this. Is it part of the ARPA ideology
to see these projects through to the 90% point and hen cut them off?

There's a _lot_ of potentially good stuff that was allowed to wither
for lack of sustained support.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Non illegitimi carborundum." (Don't let the bastards grind you down.)
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