ted@grebyn.com (Ted Holden) (03/10/90)
I assume that denizens of the C/UNIX world are mostly remote from the cares of DOD and that is as it should be. I assume also that few in the C/UNIX world know, or care enough about Ada to quickly be able to engage in effective debate with "software engineers" such as the wolfe man... that they probably think the future of computing will involve choices between C++, Smalltalk, Eiffel; again, that is how it should be, but I doubt that's how it WILL be. I believe that the choice will be between C++ and Ada and, that if America is to have a future in computer software, that C++ must win this battle. I believe that continued use of Ada and the theory of "software engineering" which travels along with it will eventually lead to total paralysis within DOD, NASA, FAA, and other government agencies as well as within a few big banks and large private organizations which are unfortunate enough to entrust major projects to it. I see Ada as a larger threat than communism at this point in time. Bill Wolfe (the wolfe man) has been so kind as to point out several of the remaining problems with C language lately, and we all know the nature and seriousness of these problems: some feature which gets used once every five years might possibly confuse somebody, or some dummy might actually get confused by the deeper meaning of "break" every three years or so... The problems with Ada, however, tend to be more grandiose than that, e.g.: o Major project utterly fails to perform adequately and is cancelled, millions wasted. o Major project many months behind schedule (e.g. STASNFINS, space telescope, WISS etc.) o Project cannot be done in Ada, hence gets done in combinations of Ada and fifty other things, portability and maintainability out the window. o User falls asleep (or dies of old age) waiting for Ada compiles, lit cigarette burns down building. o Airplanes fall out of sky and kill people (Airbus). o User's ears fall off.... Ada has more problems than can be easily counted. The two BIG ones, however, are roughly as follows: 1: It is presently being forced to compete with C and UNIX, hence the American software community, by and large, will not move to Ada. This says that Ada users will continue to pay five to twenty-five times the going rate for everything they ever do, and reinvent every wheel, all at taxpayers expense. 2: Grandiose delusions. Ada was meant to cover the two extremes of computer science (embedded systems and mainframe database applications) and everything else in between, without allowing the poor victims to use anything else but Ada. This makes for a gigantic, unuseable monstrosity which NOBODY can reasonably use for anything. C and C++ actually can handle the embedded systems and the Database systems and everything in between by making the language a minimal, easily understood, and efficient core and making everything else into libraries. If something needs fixing, you fix a library; you don't have to be fixing or modifying the language every third day. Meanwhile, the language itself doesn't involve a clunk factor which prevents users from actually doing their work. I intend to post a number of articles in the near future describing some of the real grief which Ada sufferers have been experiencing for the last few years, and which hopefully will give some of the C/C++/UNIX community a slightly better idea of how to conduct debate with the likes of the wolfe man and his buddies. Ted Holden HTE