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Is Ada Dead?
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Subject: PLZ POST: "Is Ada Dead" [Barry Boehm @ LA SIGAda Feb.17]
From: Hal Hart
No, but ...
JOINT MEETING LOS ANGELES SIGAda/SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT =================================
TITLE: "New Recommendations for DoD Usage of Ada"
SPEAKER: Dr. Barry Boehm (USC)
DATE: Monday, February 17 TIME: 5:30pm - Wine/Cheese Social Hour 6:30pm - Presentation
LOCATION: Crowne Plaza Hotel 300 N. Harbor Drive, Redondo Beach
For Further Information: contact Hal.Hart@TRW.COM, 310/764-6880
ABSTRACT: In 1996, the Department of Defense asked the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study concerning the continued viability of using Ada. The study committee's recent report provides interesting, controversial, and mixed findings. Its recommendations (which are intended to be only for the DoD) can be distilled into four major points: (1) Use Ada for warfighting software. (2) Drop the requirement for Ada for all other software. (3) Invest $15 million/year in Ada infrastructure or drop Ada altogether. (4) Integrate the Ada decision process into an overall Software Engineering Plan Review (SEPR) process.
But, is there any agreement on what "warfighting" means? How will the DoD and the Ada community overcome the common misinterpretation that (2) says "Don't use Ada in other domains"? What will be the impact in commercial domains, esp. high-reliability systems, where Ada has recently started to gain a foothold? What would you think if you read the statement "Recommendations of this study are based on a mix of inadequate data, anecdotal evidence, and expert judgment" in the report? (It's there.) Or if you found out not a single member of the committee is/was a member of the military? Why does the report advocate COTS over Ada for non-warfighting domains when Ada tools are COTS? Why does infamous Ada community flamer Ralph Crafts use one word to describe the report -- "appalled"? On the other hand, why do the AJPO Chief, Ada 95 designer Tucker Taft (a member of the NRC committee), and the SIGAda Chair [see his long letter including commentary from Tuck in the Jan/Feb97 issue of Ada LETTERS] think the long-term effect on Ada will be positive? And, what has been the DoD reaction to the recommendations? You gotta come to this meeting to find out!
BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Barry W. Boehm is well known to the Los Angeles software community and throughout the international software engineering community. He is currently the TRW Professor of Software Engineering and Director, Center for Software Engineering, at USC, and he chaired the NRC committee which conducted this study. His current research interests include software process modeling, software requirements engineering, software architectures, software metrics and cost models, software engineering environments, and knowledge-based software engineering. He invented COCOMO and the process Spiral Model, and he authored the book "Software Engineering Economics" among his many publications. Before joining the faculty of USC, Barry was Director of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Office (1989-92), at TRW from 1973 to 1989, culminating as Chief Scientist of the Defense Systems Group, and at the Rand Corporation from 1959 to 1973. A few of his many awards and honors include Fellow of the ACM, AIAA, and IEEE, and winner of the NSIA Grace Murray Hopper Award. Barry Boehm received his B.A. degree from Harvard in 1957, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1961 and 1964, all in Mathematics.
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*BONUS: We will have available at this meeting the new Dec'96 edition of the 2-disc Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM, running on ALL platforms and containing over 11 Billion bytes of Ada translators (incl. the updated validated version 3.05 of GNAT Ada95), Ada & OO courseware, Ada 95 reference manuals, 100s of reusable components from the Public Ada Library (PAL), a dozen other categories of information, + a browser. This has major updates from earlier editions. Runs under Netscape & other web browsers. $10 to members; $20 to others. (You can join on the spot for $12.) ```
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