Re: Ariane 5 Failure - Summary Report

["Byron B. Kauffman" <KauffmanBB@lfwc.lockheed.com>]

From the Summary Report:

"...The same requirement does not apply to Ariane 5, which has a
different preparation sequence and it wasmaintained for commonality 
reasons, presumably based on the view that, unless proven necessary, it 
was not wise to make changes in software which worked well on Ariane 
4..."

Is anyone else sick and tired of the COTS argument for getting rid of
the Ada mandate? Of course, the C crowd will want to blame this
scenario on Ada, but it appears to me that the same results would have
occurred no matter what language the original software was written in.
Does anyone but me think that COTS was a bad idea conjured up by a
hardware guy stuck in an office somewhere in Dayton who thinks he
knows something about hardware?

I guess we're going to have to trade in our 'software engineering' hats
for 'software scavenger/cut-and-paste/rewrite-the-interfaces' hats
(otherwise known as HACKING). 

Just my opinion, of course.