[SystemSafety] A Common Programming Language for the Department of Defense

[Derek M Jones]

Ben,

Thanks for locating and posting this report.

It is often forgotten that the original intent was for ADA (or
whatever language had been chosen) to save the DOD lots of money.

Would a single language have reduced personnel costs (around 70%
of costs according to this report)?  It would certainly have
made it easier to find staff and reduced the ability of people
who knew any non-mainstream languages used by DOD project to
charge a premium for their services.

Increased reliability is a side effect of having everybody use
the same language.

Lots of users means lots of potential customers for tool vendors,
who compete by improving tools and as well as reducing prices.

More developers using a compiler means the faults get found quicker
and it is more worthwhile for vendors to fix them.

Those wanting more numbers can find them in the following report,
cited as a source by P-1046:
https://publicaccess.dtic.mil/psm/api/service/search/search?q=&num=10&site=default_collection&as_epq=Information+Processing%2FData+Automation+Implications+of+Air+Force+Command+and+Control+Requirements+in+the+1980s&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_occt=any&btnG=Search

> David A. Fisher, "Automatic Data Processing Costs in the Defense
> Department", Institute for Defense Analyses Paper P-1046, October 1974.
>
> which my IDA colleague was also able to excavate. It can be accessed at
>
> http://www1.adacore.com/~brosgol/Fisher-IDA-P-1046.pdf
>
>
> On 4/27/2017 1:43 PM, Ben Brosgol wrote:
>> One of my colleagues at IDA sent me a pdf (7.5MB):
>>
>> http://www1.adacore.com/~brosgol/Fisher-P-1191.pdf
>>
>> The author, Dave Fisher, was also the principal author of the various
>> requirements documents (Strawman etc) that eventually led to the design
>> of the Ada language.  I was the head of the Red language team during the
>> design competition; those were interesting times :-)
>>
>> On 4/27/2017 12:47 PM, Derek M Jones wrote:
>>> All,
>>>
>>> Following a suggestion by James Inge I posted a request:
>>>> Try http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/contactus/askaLibrarian.html
>>>
>>> and just received a reply :-)
>>>
>>> "It appears that we do not currently have a digital copy of this report
>>> available. Our current estimate is 4-6 weeks for the document to be
>>> retrieved from our archives, scanned and posted on the public site
>>> (http://www.dtic.mil), although it may appear sooner. Please check the
>>> DTIC Public Collection (http://www.dtic.mil) for your report in about 30
>>> days and recheck weekly thereafter."
>>>
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>

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com