DoD-I: the summing up

After having worked a full month on EWD659 through EWD662-de.aling in turn with the four language proposals submitted to the DoD-I feel an urge to collect ~r,d order my impressions of the whole undertaking° Due to lack ~f more time, this note is produced in the same manner as the previous four: it is composed while sitting at the keyboard. For linguistic imperfections I offer my apologies. My overwhelming impression is that, in particular in combination with the Revised "IRONMAN" Requirements-about which more later-the competitive situation in which the four design groups had been placed, has been disastrous. Instead of trying to design the most adequate programming language, they have all four tried to get the next contract, and that is a completely different thing! It has had two nasty consequences. Firstly the four reports I studied were all an almost inextricable mixture of technical documentation and salestalk, and that made their study unnecessaril~ difficult and unpleasant. It made the reading unpleasant because quite often the salestalk was so close to dishonesty or nonsense that my ability to approach the design with feelings of sympathy was severly strained. It made the study unnecessarily difficult in the sense, that they showed what was intended to be possible, but left to the reader to discover for himself what had been ruled OUt. Secondly the four designs have been much to "obedient" with respect to the IRONMAN Requirements. Now, if requirements are perfect, it should be a pleasure to try to comply with them; if requirements are not sensible, a design team should have had the liberty to point that out, but on the whole that liberty has hardly been taken; if requirements are contradictory, a design team should have pointed this out, but on the whole the designs have tried to cover this up. It is here that teams may.choose between the qualifications incompetent and dishonest; I blame the competitive situation for having placed them in that uncomfortable position.