Ada Professional Questions

Ada Professional Questions

[Edward V. Berard]

I have some (strangely enough) Ada-related professionalism questions.
I would suggest that you reply directly to me on these, and I will
post the results. As usual, flames are always welcome.

   1) From a contracting office's point-of-view: How does one 
      determine a contractor's Ada capability? Since this capability
      is largely a function of the capabilities of the individuals 
      the potential contractor intends to place on the project if the 
      contract is awarded, how does a contracting office assess the
      Ada capabilities of these individuals?

   2) From a manager's point-of-view: How does one select managers
      and programmers for an Ada project? What specific
      qualifications should they have?

   3) From a programmer's or a manager's point-of-view: How do I know 
      where I stand in terms of my Ada capabilities? Am I improving, 
      or getting worse?

				-- Ed Berard
				   EBerard at ECLB
				   (301) 251 - 1626

[Last week there were some problems on the net. Some of you may have 
already seen this message.]
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Re: Ada Professional Questions

[alden]

Ed,

This is a very snobbish set of questions.  First of all I want to state  up
front that I am an advocate of Ada and support its use as a language for
development of many applications.

I call your set of questions snobbish because you are implying that Ada is
some how above other programming languages.  Ada is just a programming
language, like any other programming language.  It takes an input file
of programmmed code in non machine language and generates an output
file which the operating system can load into the machines memory for
execution.  Amazing ...  even fortran  ... or god forbid assembly language
does this. 

Your questions about professionalism specific for Ada suggest that there be
some separate criteria to chose Ada programmers.  What suggests that Ada
is special.  Currently the only thing that sets Ada out is the fact that
its a new language and not many people have used it yet.  I have worked 
with many people who have learned to effectively use Ada on the job in
a few months.  Granted their code is not the most sophisticated code, but
then again most applications don't need to use tricky aspects of the language
to get hte job done ...  because the job could have been done in fortran and
since Ada can do what fortran does (at least!) and fortran does not have 
the power of Ada then presumably you can expect simple aspects of Ada to
be effective.  I do suggest that we use Ada to code like fortran... everyone
is trying to avoid this.

The major point is that if someone codes a program in Ada and the program is
sound (i.e. works well), and organized accourding to the packaging constructs
supplied by Ada then no one should have any complaints.

What and how programmers organize their programmers should be controlled
by the project manager of the project in question.  It is the job of the
project manager to set such coding standards .. this is true for projects
coded in any language even fortran and assembly.  


In addition, your suggestions for guidelines suggest that you are not 
interested in bringing Ada into wide use by as many programmers as possible.
For Ada to become a real standard, and for its use to be enforced by DoD
contracts, the majority of the contractor community must be using it.
Restrictions at this point would only undermine this effort to get
programmers up in Ada.

In summary, your questions suggest that the average programmer is 
incapable of learning Ada but somehow capable of learning say Pascal.
You really show examine the motivations of you questions before you put
them out for public response.  


	... Tony Alden
	TRW

Re: Ada Professional Questions

[emiya]

I've just read these two letters again, I think they best belong in
soft-eng.  They are broader scope than Ada alone.  How does any contracting
body tell if a contractor is worth their salt.  I've seen a large number of
body shops in the past six years which tells me that people bid on contracts
without having the requisite expertise in house in hopes of hiring people
along the way.  I know this because the Xerox XTEN project tried three times
hire me for what I regarded as a project which had no hope of succeeding.

I don't think Ed's comments were snobbish.  I think they show a real concern
about how contracts are written.  It's a real problem.  There are too many
people on the Ada bandwagon.  I don't think writing Ada programs are much
harder than other languages, but I do think the class of programs [real-time
embedded systems] working in distributed environments are harder than
your typical FORTRAN simulation or analysis package.  My favorite Ada
example is in Mary Shaw's book: the LaPlace solver for Cm* the 50 processor
multiprocessor [done with Peter Hibbard] based on G. Baudet's PhD thesis.
This six page program is otherwise, basically about 5 lines of FORTRAN
on a uniprocessor [including two CONTINUEs].  It's the class of programs which
are harder.  Writing a spread sheet in Ada and FORTRAN is going to be
about the same difficulty in either language.

Many of the people who read these contracts are just managers and lawyers
and procurement types.  They don't know programming.  They don't understand
the issues of deadlock, debugging, having clear requirements.....
Not all are this way, but many are.  They are concern with crossing T and
dotting i's  [I'm being a bit extreme, sorry, flame off, too long].
EOF

--eugene miya
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