Re: Ada in Iraq

[snarflemike@yahoo.com (Mike Silva)]

18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ) wrote in message news:<bebbba07.0304241712.698fbc85@posting.google.com>...
> 
> Your continued obsession with Ada for purely academic reasons is a
> seemingly naive approach to real software development.

So when you argue for Ada on technical grounds it's obsessing, and
when he rejects (not, apparently, refutes) your arguments he's being
sophisticated (the opposite of naive?).

> I have not
> seen any legitimate justification for switching to Ada.

So he *has* refuted the various studies and white papers you've
pointed him to?

> Which feature
> of Ada critical to our **** development cannot be achieved with
> C/C++/Java?

The old Turing argument.  We can do anything in any language!

>  There are several reasons why Ada is not practical. 
> First, there is no in-house large-scale Ada application development
> experience among the software developers or civil servants.  We can't
> wait around while 40 developers come up speed. Furthermore, i'll be
> blunt and say there was "little" in-house C++  experience when the
> **** was redesigned and we're still paying the price for that
> inexperience.  Second, the FAA does not use Ada for the rest of its
> FFP software development.  The bottomline is that in today's world, if
> you want to draw from the largest pool of talent, you better be
> programming in C, C++ or Java.

Well, which is it -- are they going to retrain their current
developers or hire new ones?  BTW, I imagine that the *percentage* of
C/C++/Java developers who could easily step into an ATC project is a
lot lower than the percentage of Ada developers who could easily do
so.  Lots less reading of resumes and interviewing only to end up at
don't-call-us-we'll-call-you.

> Call it inertia if you want. It
> doesn't matter really.  Ultimately, any truly critical Ada feature
> will eventually be added to C++ or Java.

This is the best yet!  They don't have time to train their developers,
but they have time to wait for truly critical features to be added to
C++ or Java!

Oh, and there's a really big talent pool of VB programmers out there. 
Any truly critical Ada feature will eventually get added to VB, right?

I think the best you could hope for is to do a part of the project in
Ada and have great success while the rest of the project founders. :-/

Mike