From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,11414a19b0e4a97a,start X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!t26g2000prt.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: usenet@scriptoriumdesigns.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:01:26 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <101bf8f3-b823-45ee-9afd-40cbafb4b7a9@t26g2000prt.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 76.216.160.90 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1276988486 24298 127.0.0.1 (19 Jun 2010 23:01:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:01:26 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: t26g2000prt.googlegroups.com; posting-host=76.216.160.90; posting-account=H7NWPAoAAABNzgi4DMy1pgNsNq9QU0H_ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.70 Safari/533.4,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:12796 Date: 2010-06-19T16:01:26-07:00 List-Id: I may have the opportunity to pitch Ada for use in some new projects (industrial equipment) at work. The place has been using C by default, not by any conscious choice, and of course they've been paying a typical price for that default. The head of engineering (who is not a software guy) MAY be open to trying Ada if presented with a compelling case. The programmers are another question - they may resist or they may be intrigued by some of Ada's features e.g. concurrency. They may also be open to improving the very ad-hoc software culture now in place, and the idea of having fewer bugs, and those caught sooner and less painfully. So, what points would you emphasize to each (manager, programmers) to make the Ada sale? I've read a lot of the advocacy and I think I have a fair handle on it, but I'd still like other viewpoints, and perhaps even examples of such a successful switch. In the end, it seems, it all comes down to money. Money saved in greater productivity and less debugging, money saved in lower liability and maintenance, money gained from satisfied customers who get a robust product, and maybe even money saved in having programmers who have a more powerful and safer tool at their disposal. I know that language choice is not the be-all-and-end-all of better software, but I'm convinced it's a key component, and I'm also convinced that the sooner we leave C and its baggage behind the better we can become.