From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on
	ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham
	autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1
Date: 20 May 93 14:30:29 GMT
From: agate!howland.reston.ans.net!torn!utnut!utzoo!censor!geac!lethe!uunorth!e
yepoint!alvin@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Alvin Starr)
Subject: Re: Alsys, how insignificant is 18,000?
Message-ID: <1993May20.143029.806@eyepoint.com>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

emery@goldfinger.mitre.org (David Emery) writes:

>>People are choosing C++ technology over Ada, with their own money (and
>>fault in your analogy), because for 90% of their missions, C++ is more
>>cost effective than Ada (given the supply of programmers, tools,
>>libraries, books that are available).

>I'd like to see some studies demonstrating:
>	1.  People make these decisions based on cost-effectiveness,
>	    or any other rational process, and
>	2.  C++ _is_ more cost-effective than Ada, C, FORTRAN, BLISS,
>	    or any other language.

>My belief is that choice of language is dictated more by perceived
>popularity than any technical factor.

I have been casting about for years to see if somebody has done a study
on what effects language structure has on programmer effectiveness and
reliability. I have yet to find anybody that knows of a single study in
that field.

Most of the arguments that I have seen to date about the cost effectiveness
of languages tend to center on the costs and availability of educational
material and development tools. Some times arguments will flow around
the long term costs of maintenance but in most cases these arguments are 
just for sticking to a single language as opposed to having a free for all.
 
I know that in the past when the engineering team that I was part of had
to move from a rigid structured language to C, we found that our productivity
and code reliability went down the toilet. It seems to me that people are
really focusing on the wrong features in a language as being important.
The real question should be how does this feature interact with human 
nature. I personally believe that language features that provide easy to
use access to bad coding style are the real bain of programming languages.
In C and C++ it is far too easy to break down to using dangerous language
features in Ada it is somewhat harder to do. But Ada should not be considered
the last word in language design. The things that apeal to me in terms of
neat language features may in reality not be the best choices for the users
of that language. In some ways a language is just a user interface for
programmers to get access to the underlying system and maybe some of the 
same types of research that goes into determining how users intract with
GUIs should be applied to programming languages.

-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)513-6717
Eyepoint Inc.                 ||   fax:   (416)513-6718
alvin@eyepoint.com            ||