Re: chief programmer team organizations was (c++ vs ada results)

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:

>jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

>>I'm talking here of things like the multi-MILLION
>>line FAA rewrite of the U.S. air traffic control system.

>      There's a school of thought that if you're writing something that big,
>your approach is wrong, and you need to develop some abstraction that makes
>the job smaller and moves most of the specifics into some kind of database.

There's a school of thought that people who belong to the other school
of thought suffer from having never actually BUILT an air traffic control
system. ;-)

As far as developing abstractions that move the "specifics into some kind
of database", I find "some kind of database" to be rather vague. An air
traffic control system consists of a bewildering array of input sources
(e.g. various kinds of radar) with various signal processing requirements,
critical real time constraints, distributed heterogeneous networking,
and a host of other nasties. In short--they're COMPLICATED. And to top
it off, if they fail, people die. In large numbers. All at once.

It may seem surprising, but the folks that build these things actually
tend to be very bright, very motivated, and very concerned that they
do it correctly. They aren't boobs, and there's a REASON why the code
is big. They're not just writing code to write code. Whenever I hear
someone say that these systems are "too big", I'm reminded of the scene
in "Amadeus" where the emperor chides Mozart for using "too many notes",
to which Mozart replies "Which notes would you have me remove, Sire?".
Which lines of code would you have removed from an air traffic control
system? The display code that manages the screens? The error detection
and correction code? The code that interfaces with the various radars
and normalizes the incoming data? I'm sure there must be literally
hundreds of thousands of superfluous code in there somewhere...
-- 
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