RE: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

["Christopher Barber" <address@hidden>]

> Remember Ada and C?  As I heard it, the DoD required all
> their software to be written in Ada, and you had to get
> an exemption to use anything else.  But the best hackers
> insisted on using C, and the DoD had to grant so many
> exemptions that Ada soon became a dead letter.

I think that overstates the case a bit.  It basically was a cost issue.  The
DoD became interested in saving money and recognized that it was not
reasonable to force everyone to use a technology that would cost more.  Ada
was more expensive to use than other languages because: (1) there weren't
that many Ada developers out there and many programmers were reluctant to
sign on to an Ada project knowing that Ada was not used much outside of the
defense industry (2) there was a lack of good software libraries for use
with Ada, so you often had to roll your own (3) Ada compilers and tools were
more expensive than commercial tools.  So it became pretty easy to get a
COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) exemption to use some other language if you
could show that you would make use of some prewritten non-Ada software
libraries.

- Christopher