(j3.2006) Ada committee doesn't do business with INCITS (or IEEE)

Tue Dec 5 20:00:23 EST 2017

Van,

The  AGU/IEEE analogy should be easily dismissed when speaking to anyone that actually listens.   ?Your? INCITS membership is for CalTech _not_ Van Snyder.   CalTech can send anyone else at any time without paying a cent more and without signing any additional increments.   Nothing at all like that is true for AGU.   If I don?t go to the fall meeting, I cannot send someone else in my place.  That would be fraud.

I?m a bit more sympathetic on the ?advocacy? issue, and very sympathetic on the exponential fee issue.     However, he Fed. Government, including NASA, _does_ advocate for some things.   These _include_ international standardization efforts.   It does not advocate for commercial/partisian/?.   and the distinction seems to be important.

From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org> on behalf of Van Snyder <Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov>
Organization: Yes
Reply-To: "Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov" <Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov>, fortran standards email list for J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
Date: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 5:15 PM
To: j3 <j3 at j3-fortran.org>
Subject: Re: (j3.2006) Ada committee doesn't do business with INCITS (or IEEE)

On Tue, 2017-12-05 at 19:56 +0000, Bill Long wrote:

I don?t see how we avoid the image of having become just as dead and irrelevant as Ada.

WG9 ARG has (at least) fifteen members.

Ada was never intended for use for scientific and engineering programming, video games, databases, or web pages.  It was intended from the start for high reliability.  It's difficult to say "high reliability" and "C++" in the same sentence without laughing (or crying).

Ada Europe / Reliable Software Technologies conferences typically have 100-150 attendees.  At this year's week-long 22nd annual meeting there were two parallel sessions with 25 papers presented.  When was the last Fortran conference with more than 10 attendees?  The closest thing to that have been workshops organized every three years or so by IFIP WG 2.5, but the only Fortran committee members I've ever seen at those meetings were John Reid and Brian Smith.

Cassini flight software was written in Ada, not C++, and ran flawlessly in 26 processors for twenty years.  Developers originally wanted to use C++, but soon found the Ada compiler was diagnosing problems that would never have been found if C++ had been used, resulting in failure of a $billions mission.

Reliability is also important for scientific and engineering software.  There are important things Fortran can copy from Ada (and Eiffel).  Unless we want users to continue the SGI priorities: Get it out, get it fast, get it right (and they never seemed to have time for the last one).

If Fortran doesn't modernize (i.e., if we sit on our hands again) Fortran will become more irrelevant than Bill's perception of Ada.  And by "modernize" I mean serious computer science, not just copying a fad from C or C++.

I think that if INCITS does something bad enough that Fortran, C, and C++ ALL decide to leave, then it is reasonable to consider our options. So far, they have not crossed that line.

A 550% increase in participation dues since 1997 is pretty close to that line.  That averages almost 9%, with a 15% increase this year.  All the "help" that's supposed to buy from INCITS just makes our work more difficult.  The membership agreement was almost the straw that broke the camel's back at JPL.  It was very difficult for Lynn to convince the lawyers that INCITS isn't an advocacy group, even though the membership agreement says ITIC is one.  Lawyers and bean counters were worrked that if a membership agreement was signed for me, all the scientists and engineers will want JPL to pay their AGU and IEEE membership dues.

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