Survey of Computer Programming Languages Currently Used in the Department ofDefense

摘要

This study reports on a programming language survey commissioned by the AssistantSecretary of Defense for C3I to determine how many programming languages are being used in the DoD today as compared to 20 years ago when the DoD began development of the Ada language. The sample population for this survey consisted of weapons systems taken from the 1994 Presidential Budget requests for RDTE programs exceeding $15 million and Procurement budgets exceeding $25 million. The current DoD list of major Automated Information Systems was used as the survey sample for non-weapons systems. The survey found that over 80% of the applications in the sample were written in third generation languages. Moreover, it identified 37 third generation languages in contrast to an estimate of at least 450 general purpose languages and dialects in 1974. In weapons systems modernization, Ada is the most commonly used language.