Re: employment with ada

[DPH <rally2xs@compuserve.com>]

On Sat, 03 May 2003 12:17:31 -0700, Richard Riehle
<richard@adaworks.com> wrote:

>DPH wrote:
>
>> At the conference, one of the 40 minute talks was given by Lockheed
>> Martin on the Fate of Ada in the Joint Strike Fighter project.
>>
>> Starting out by saying that they are all personally Ada zealots, and
>> strongly believe the langauge to be superior to anything else around,
>> the company was forced, by business realities, to do their safety
>> critical software in the Joint Strike Fighter in a safety critical
>> subset of C.
>
>Reading through the list of reasons given for abanonding Ada in JSF,
>I cannot agree with their decision.   There are plenty of opportunities
>for Ada training outside the university environment, some of it of
>better quality than they would get in college classes.

Yes, and training people is counterproductive when you're exit
interviews are turning up reasons like "I don't want to be stuck with
experience only in a dead language."

>The LMCO programmers are, as with any other kind of employee,
>expected to work with the tools and resources appropriate to the
>job.   Looking for another job is secondary to that.

Its not secondary to the person looking for another job because they
fear personal obsolescence.

>The focus of the JSF effort is to produce the best quality software
>possible for the aircraft.

Not true for any business.  The focus of any company is to make money.

>Instead, they cobble together a set of
>restrictions for C, restrictions we can be assured will be ignored
>over the lifetime of the project.

They're using an automated tool to enforce them, so ignoring them will
be difficult.

>Some Ada compiler publishers have vanished.   Many of those
>were simply acquired by Ada compiler publishers that still exist.  Some
>should have gone out of business a long time ago.   A few are hanging
>on by a slim margin, and this decision does not help.  The hardware
>vendor compilers (HP, Tandem, etc.) actually used Alsys (now
>Aonix) compilers with their own label so the list of compilers is
>smaller, but the original developers are still around.

Dec never made an Ada 95 for VMS.  I just learned that Rational Rose
RealTime doesn't speak Ada.  What's with that?  If you can't generate
code automatically from one of the most popular UML tools in
existence, what does that say?

>Though the LMCO presenters may consider themselves "zealots,"
>and though they think this was a "boneheaded" business decision,

"Boneheaded" was my word, not theirs, BTW.  They love Ada, but think
using it would be counterproductive to profits in the long run, that's
all.

Its the BetaMax - VHS scenario all over again.  Being technically
superior doesn't really count for much nowdays.

>if the reasons they gave are the real reasons, it was a wrong
>decision.

Doesn't sound like it to me.

If they really can't find programmers, which is a common complaint
heard from many sources, so is probably true, then that's a valid
factor.

If they really do lose people simply by assigning them to Ada, then
that's a factor.

If Ada compiler vendors are going out of business, 1 by 1, as time
goes by, and unnneccesary source code conversions will be required
simply for this purpose, then that's a factor.

Take all the factors together, and it appears to make sense.

>It will cost them more in the long run,  they will be
>fighting with quality issues in C they would not encounter with
>Ada, and the programmers they are trying to retain with C will
>leave just as quickly if not more so than if they were using Ada.

If you don't know the particulars of the 172 C language restrictions,
nor the tool used to enforce them and check the code for other errors,
I don't see how you can say that.  I doubt there are any studies
outside of LM comparing the error rates between Ada and their own
particular way of doing C.  This C strategy may indeed be close enough
to Ada in error avoidance to be superior to Ada when considering the
stated drawbacks that would be incurred by using Ada.

I always condemned the short-sighted idea that companies must be able
to hire people that already program in the language of interest
instead of training them, but when they leave because they fear
obsolescense, then that is a real problem that can't be ignored.

>It is interesting  to me that, as I see DoD contractors making the error
>of moving away from Ada toward inferior technologies, non-DoD
>organizations are discovering its benefits (some of them are not
>in the U.S.) and enjoying success with it.   This is one more example
>of the old phrase, "grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory."

Assumedly foreign programmers will feel less threatened by being a
programmer in a "dead langauge" if indeed it is not dead in their
country.  The might just have the freedom to get down to business and
learn it well.

Dave Head

>Richard Riehle