Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian)]

>From: sampson@nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson)
>     The impetus behind the effort that led to Ada was the DoD's conclusion
>in the 70's that the proliferation of languages being used at that time was
>a major part of the cost of DoD software.  This conclusion was based on
>studies, but I don't remember if they addressed the issue of tool costs. 
>Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea where you should look to find
>government documents this old or how you can request them if you know where
>to look.

   Given the large scale use of non-Ada languages by people inside the
DoD itself presently, I doubt the value of these reports if the very same
organization's people don't pay any attention to them.  Besides, there
are a small number of DoD reports (most suppressed) showing that the 
country does not have the infrastructure to support a one language policy,
and that most of the initial promises made about Ada benefit and Ada
policies were completely wrong.

   Here's a classic example of the intellectual myopia that plagues most
Ada policy statements.  In the SEI sub-study for the Mosemann reports,
SEI states that it uses a set of criteria from IBM to assess the benefits
of using Ada and C++, and determined Ada was better, which they stated and
was touted to death.  What they didn't observe was that most of the criteria,
if not all, equally as well applied to the life-cycle programming problems
of the corporate world, a world to which IBM is saying that Smalltalk and
C++ are your future answers.

    Thus either SEI used the criteria incorrectly, IBM used the criteria
incorrectly, the criteria are incorrect (all three of which it is hard to
believe, especially in an Ada context since the DoD gives these guys tons
of money to do things correctly), or that SEI's conclusion is meaningless
for some other reason.  Given this trend in programming language analysis,
I question how relevant any of those reports you cite are, for those 
reports probably have similar problems, and even if not, too many people
inside the DoD itself right now are disobeying a federal regulation and
not using Ada.  I always thought that one rule for any soldier was to obey
all of the laws of the land.

    What has killed Ada over the years is the DoD's lack of interest in
honest assessments of its language and policies, made dishonest by basing
conclusions on only favorable data and funding people with a vested 
interest in offering conclusions that ensure that their funding will be
continued.  And for those few internal studies that are more methodical and
realistic, the DoD either suppresses them or classifies them, effectively
preventing anyone from ever finding about even the DoD's own doubts.

-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian
 Source Translation & Optimization
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178