ABEE in the Uncanny Valley

With technology and television, North American society is increasingly isolated. Gone are the days when you gather around the barber to hear the latest news, or the days when you take up a hobby...we're too busy doing productive, life-affirming work like watching "Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy".

Isolationism creates distrust. In recent weeks, a Canadian politician lost her position when a pizza delivery man (with a criminal history) made allegations against her. As satirist Rick Mercer said on his "Monday Report" television show, if it was that easy to get rid of politicians that he didn't like, he would have to put pizza places on his speed dial.

Programmers are some of the worst offenders for the crime of distrust. In the last couple of months, PegaSoft offered to help a new Toronto area Linux Users Group get off the ground. They turned down our assistance. Why? No reason: they just didn't trust us.

PegaSoft's Business Shell is part of a proposed standard called "ABEE", the Ada-BUSH Enterprise Endeavour. Using GCC Ada, PegaSoft's BUSH, JGNAT and A# you have a command shell, scripts, Java or .Net applets, and enterprise-wide applications which all adhere to a single development standard. But can you trust ABEE?

On February 8, Datamation announced their Product of the Year awards. Their Enterprise Linux Award went to popular Mozilla's Firefox browser, but the one of the runners up, a product with the same caliber as Firefox, was Ada Core Technologies' GNAT Pro Toolset. This is the commercial version of GCC Ada, the "A" in "ABEE". The software industry recognizes the advantages to the enterprise of one of the ABEE components. So where are the Linux developers that should be flocking to ABEE?

Perhaps the answer can be found in the Uncanny Valley. "Uncanny" is the term used by computer animators to describe the effect of near perfect animation. The subtle flaws in the computer model nag at the mind of the viewer, making the animated figures creepy and disturbing. The look real and yet they are not. In "Wired" magazine, the animators of Shrek admitted to reducing the quality of their animation to move the viewers away from the brink of that Uncanny Valley, a place where they cannot quite trust what their eyes see.

After four years of development, PegaSoft's Business Shell is pushing ABEE closer and closer to a reality. JSP and .Net have features that BUSH does not...but likewise BUSH has features that JSP and .Net lack. With version 1.0.0, BUSH has the features necessary to perform most web and scripting applications...but the key word is "most".

To be sure, there are paradigm issues. A recent posting to comp.lang.ada complained that the Ada world had no way to create Perl hashes and link them to a DBM pseudo-database. True, but that's ugly so why would you want to: use a BUSH array with an enumerated index and SQL to do the same thing, and do it much more safely and accurately.

Such issues aside, to the eye of the programmer, the closer ABEE comes to reality, the more suspect those few missing features are. They are on the brink of the Uncanny Valley. A superior solution to JSP, Perl, PHP, Python and so on is just so close...so close that it seems further way than if it never existed.

Even Mozilla was dismissed for several years...until Firefox was released.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

February 8, 2005