Re: ada-c++ productivity

[ftpam1@acad3.alaska.edu (MUNTS PHILLIP A)]

In article <1991Mar16.205228.4268@grebyn.com>, ted@grebyn.com (Ted Holden) writes...
>Productivity of C++ users will vary according to skills, experience
>levels, tools available, such as the fabulous new Borland interface, and
>the task at hand.  An idea of productivity in Ada projects may be had
>from the Feb. 11 issue of Federal Computer Week:

..

>    "Three lines of code per day is absurd [as if ten wasn't], said
>    Ralph Crafts, editor of a newsletter on Ada, and an expert
>    witness for the protester.....
> 
>Whether any realistic combination of events exists which could reduce
>Pascal, C, or C++ programmers to this level of productivity is anybody's
>guess;  my own opinion is that most C programmers would require a bullet
>through the brain to be brought to such a level.

..

     Actually, 10 lines per day isn't all that unreasonable, averaged over
a year for example.  The keyword is AVERAGED: on a good day I may write
hundreds of lines of code; I may spend the next day trying to find an 
obscure bug in one of those lines.

     A programmer also does a lot of other things like attending meetings,
reading documentation, writing documentation, studying a problem, answering
the phone, filling out forms, reformatting that [censored] hard disk, etc.
Then there is waiting for the network to come back up, putting paper in the
laser printer...

     In theory, you are supposed to spend most of your time DESIGNING rather
than CODING, as well.  I have spent days perfecting algorithms that were set
down in code in hours or even minutes.

     In the ideal case, the manager would chain his slaves, er, employees to
their computer until the job is done.  In practice things don't work out
that way.  The whole idea of "lines per day" is pretty artificial anyway.
(The contract says x lines per day so we'll just pad things out with a little
whitespace...)  What matters is whether a product is delivered on time or
not, and if it meets the spec.

CAVEAT: Most of what I do is in assembly language or Turbo Pascal.  I don't
particularly like C or C++ (or assembly language for that matter) and I haven't
found an Ada compiler that generates decent code.  (I am constrained to the
low end of the marketplace, being self- rather than government-employed.)

Philip Munts N7AHL
NRA Extremist, etc.
University of Alaska, Fairbanks