Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lanl!opus!ted From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) Newsgroups: comp.sw.components Subject: ada vaporware (long) Message-ID: Date: 7 May 89 04:19:47 GMT References: <6718@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <5419@hubcap.clemson.edu> Sender: news@nmsu.edu Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 125 In-reply-to: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu's message of 6 May 89 18:15:09 GMT [ the following started as simple grumbling, but blossomed into full scale ada-hype bashing. take it as you well; my asbestos suit is on ] Software components aren't be a bad idea. Unfortunately the people pushing them seem to smugly assume that there is some logical equivalence between ada and software components. They even seem to think that ada is a reasonable way to implement software components. These people are certainly correct that it will take every known technique known to the software industry (not just componentry), to make ada programs reliable. The are incorrect when they assert that ada is a good (or even reasonable) tool for writing and maintaining software in general, and large systems in particular. The particular problem is only a single aspect of the basic problem with the ada movement which is that the impetus is being provided by people who are technically incompetent in the field. I have annotated the parts of a previous posting with comments about this pervasive problem: In article <5419@hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) writes: From: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) Newsgroups: comp.sw.components Date: 6 May 89 18:15:09 GMT References: <6718@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> REUSEABILITY LIBRARY FRAMEWORK (RLF) o The Reuseability Library Framework is a set of building blocks and tools for building, maintaining, and accessing knowledge-based libraries of Ada software components. what is a knowledge-based library other than a buzz-word? the madison avenue implication here is that the library actually understands what it contains and will help you find what you need. _right_ o The base set of tools supports the creation and maintenance of "intelligent software librarians": repositories of reuseable Ada components organized around particular application domains. of course it doesn't support this at all, since no such "intelligent software librarians" (quote marks are apt here aren't they) exist to be maintained, and noone currently knows how to create them. ... o Library tools access this embedded knowledge to provide active "intelligent" guidance to users in focused search and retrieval of library components. funny how suddenly the ada community has acheived what ai has failed to do for years. or are we really just talking about doing key-word or full text search of abstracts describing each package. o Testing and qualification of candidate components for inclusion into the reuse library are performed prior to cataloging the component in the library. is this policy or mechanism? is the testing done to the standards used in magellan (latest catastrophic bug found less than two weeks ago), or the hubble space telescope? Qualifying Librarian / \ \ \ / \ \ \ Test Plan Librarian Systems Assistant / \ / \ / Hybrid Knowledge Representation Systems / \ / \ AdaKNET AdaTAU Semantic Rule-Based Network System the implication that the qualifying librarian and the test plan assistant are automated. this is bullshit. the bottom three items are intrinsicly vapor even if there is code that is claimed to do this. ADA COMMAND ENVIRONMENT (ACE) o The Ada Command Environment is an interactive, object-oriented command language environment for Ada software development. do i hear another buzz word (or 10)? o Ada is both the programming language and the command language used within ACE. The paradigm and philosophy used by the Ada programmer for program development are extended into the environment in which program development takes place. does this imply quantum leaps in the technology of type inferencing? or is this as problematical as debuggers like dbx? o ACE is modeled after the interactive programming environments known for individual programmer productivity. this can't mean lisp machines. ace is obviously modeled on ada, which is antithetical to the freewheeling development model of programming which is at the heart of the classical lisp machine. ... o ACE has been implemented on Sun Workstations (R) running the Unix (R) operating system. ACE has also been ported to the Unisys PC/IT running the MS-DOS (R) operating system. i hear a past tense here. this implies that much of the foregoing hype that i found so objectionably overblown is just that and that ace is basically turbo-ada. why can't they just say this? ... [ continuation of electronic glossy brochure ]